An international team of scientists have created a new state of matter when they made aluminum transparent or invisible by beaming a very powerful x-ray laser to it.

The new state of matter existed only for 40 femtoseconds or a fraction of a nanosecond after being blasted by a FLASH laser in Hamburg, Germany. With the energy equivalent to the amount of electricity that powers a city, the pulse of soft x-ray light from the laser knocked down an electron in each ion of an aluminum foil making it transparent.

The new state of matter created is dense but extremely hot or similar to the condition believed to exist in the core of a giant planet like Jupiter. The technique also offers scientists a way to understand what is going on inside a miniature star and possibly recreate such energy on Earth for power generation.

Oxford University scientists Professor Justin Wark, Dr. Bob Nagler, Dr. Gianluca Gregori, William Murphy, Sam Vinko and Thomas Whitcher led the experiment published in the journal Nature Physics.