Hard X-ray sources from femtosecond (fs) laser-produced plasmas, including the betatron X-rays from laser wakefield-accelerated electrons, have compact sizes, fs pulse duration and fs pump-probe capability, making it promising for wide use in material and biological sciences. Currently the main problem with such betatron X-ray sources is the limited average flux even with ultra-intense laser pulses. Here, we report ultra-bright betatron X-rays can be generated using a clustering gas jet target irradiated with a small size laser, where a ten-fold enhancement of the X-ray yield is achieved compared to the results obtained using a gas target. We suggest the increased X-ray photon is due to the existence of clusters in the gas, which results in increased total electron charge trapped for acceleration and larger wiggling amplitudes during the acceleration. This observation opens a route to produce high betatron average flux using small but high repetition rate laser facilities for applications.

An on-line visual ferrograph (OLVF) characterized by direct reading and on-line analysis was developed based on magnetic deposition and image analysis. A digital sensor was integrated with a CMOS image sensor to obtain images of deposited wear debris under illumination conditions. An electromagnetic instrument was designed to deposit the wear debris flowing through an oil flow channel. The oil flow channel, fixed on the electromagnet, was arranged parallel to the magnetic flux in the air gap between two electromagnet poles. The deposition effect on wear debris was analyzed theoretically. The result shows that the wear debris in different sizes can be deposited in the same zone by controlling the oil flow rate and magnet field intensity. Corresponding application software for image sampling and processing was developed. An index of relative wear debris concentration, IPCA (Index of Particle Coverage Area), is given as an output in addition to wear debris images. Finally, two kinds of experiments were specified to assess the effect and validity of the OLVF. The results show that the OLVF has effective deposition and identification for both relatively large and small wear debris with rational control parameters. The validity examinations with the commercial particle quantifier (PQ) and direct reading ferrograph (DR) show that the OLVF has an approaching trend to the reference instruments in both heavily and lightly contaminated oil.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought great threat to human health. Its causative agent is a severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus which has been officially named SARS-CoV-2. Here we report the discovery of extremely low CG abundance in its open reading frames. We found that CG reduction in SARS-CoV-2 is achieved mainly through mutating C/G into A/T, and CG is the best target for mutation. Meanwhile, 5′-untranslated region of SARS-CoV-2 has high CG content and is capable of forming an internal ribosome entry site (IRES) to recruit host ribosome for translating its RNA. These features allow SARS-CoV-2 to reproduce efficiently in host cells, because less energy is consumed in disrupting the stem-loops formed by its genomic RNA. Notably, genomes of cellular organisms also have very low CG abundance, suggesting that mutating C/G into A/T occurs universally in all life forms. Moreover, CG is the dinucleotide related to CpG island, mutational hotspot and single nucleotide polymorphism in cellular organisms. The relationship between these features is worthy of further investigations.

Bright Ar K-shell x-ray with very little background has been generated using an Ar clustering gas jet target irradiated with an 800 mJ, 30 fs ultra-high contrast laser, with the measured flux of 1.1 x 10 4 photons/mrad 2 /pulse. This intense x-ray source critically depends on the laser contrast and the laser energy and the optimization of this source with interaction is addressed. Electron driven by laser electric field directly via nonlinear resonant is proved in simulation, resulting in effective electron heating and the enhancement of x-ray emission. The x-ray pulse duration is demonstrated to be only 10 fs, as well as a source size of 20 µm, posing great potential application for single-shot ultrafast x-ray imaging.