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Physicists Have Created the Brightest Light Ever Recorded (vice.com)
Jason Koebler writes: A group of physicists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Extreme Light Laboratory announced Monday that they have created the brightest light ever produced on Earth using Diocles, one of the most powerful lasers in the United States. When this high intensity laser pulse, which is one billion times brighter than the surface of the sun, strikes the electron, it causes it to behave differently. By firing this laser at individual electrons, the researchers found that past a certain threshold, the brightness of light will actually change an object's appearance rather than simply making it brighter. The x-rays that are produced in this fashion have an extremely high amount of energy, and Umstadter and his colleagues think this could end up being applied in a number of ways. For starters, it could allow doctors to produce x-ray medical images on the nanoscale, which would allow them to detect tumors and other anomalies that regular x-rays might have missed. Moreover, it could also be used for more sophisticated x-ray scanning at airports and other security checkpoints.
In this experiment they are basically jamming up the valence shells with photon wavepacket energy - the valence shells do not have time to "discharge" the energy before getting hit again, so they get overloaded in a sense. The output photons combine the energies of the input photons allowing for various harmonic (double, triple etc) frequency (i.e. energy) of the incoming photons. Basically if you consider normal decay times for re-emission under normal (not-so-bright light flux conditions), if you can fire photons at an atom faster than the average decay (normal re-emission) time, you'll start to get these energy-combining effects. The "appearance" changes because the normal preservation of angular momentum in the output re-emission is also altered (along with the output energy) because it must be preserved as well, so you don't get re-emission at the regular angle anymore.