London, July 28 - Scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world's most powerful soft X-ray laser.

The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is 10 billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world (for example Britain's Diamond Light Source).

The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the total output of a plant powering an entire city.

'Transparent aluminium' previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

An international team, led by Oxford University scientists, reported that a short pulse from the FLASH laser 'knocked out' a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal's crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focussed all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair.