Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser.   Of course, you remember in Star Trek IV, Scotty traded the formula for  ‘Transparent aluminium’ to get the plexiglass needed to store the humpback whales in the Klingon Bird of Prey.  But the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

“What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,” said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. “Transparent aluminium is just the start…which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.”

Transparent aluminium is ‘new state of matter’.