As director of photon science at DESY, Edgar Weckert is responsible for an impressive array of scientific equipment, including the FLASH free electron laser.

In this interview filmed in FLASH’s vast experimental hall, Weckert describes some of the laser’s greatest accomplishments, including how it was used to make aluminium momentarily transparent to light. FLASH has become so popular with scientists that DESY has to turn down a significant number of beam-time requests. But photon scientists mustn’t despair, according to Weckert, because plans are well under way for FLASH II, which will double the capacity of the existing facility.

Weckert also explains how FLASH is informing the development of the European XFEL and gives an update on DESY’s PETRA III light source, which has been up and running for about a year.

• For readers interested in finding out more about the research at DESY, Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics has just published a special issue entitled Intense X-ray Science: the First Five Years of FLASH. All papers in the issue are free to download until March 2011.