Junko Morikawa

A film as thin as a spider's web, made of five metals, took the hit from a laser. Inside, the pressure soared to 55 gigapascals — imagine a hundred elephants balanced on your thumbnail. The alloy withstood it, compressing for a fraction of a nanosecond without breaking. One gigapascal is a thousand megapascals.

A tantalum film two hundred nanometers thick sits on a quartz substrate. Within it lies hidden future light: if you heat the metal properly, it turns into a transparent oxide through which light from an implanted LED can pass. The problem is that conventional heating methods are either too harsh or too slow.