While we were taking data yesterday here at Brookhaven, we quickly realized that something was going wrong. The data we took did not match the theoretical predictions about them. Specifically, when you shoot a laser into a plasma you expect the laser to go through if the plasma is not very strong (=dense). Instead, we saw that as soon as we turned the plasma on, the laser was not showing up on the other side.
We double checked our setup and rebuilt it twice, and yet the issue is still there. So today we'll have to come up with a theory why this is happening, and also device an experiment that will allows us to verify the predictions... Let's see!
