We report here that the femtosecond lasers like low average power Ti:Sapphire lasers, the JAERI high average power free-electron laser and others could peel off and remove two stress corrosion cracking (SCC) origins of the cold-worked and the cracking susceptible material, and residual tensile stress in hardened and stretched surface of low-carbon stainless steel cubic samples for nuclear reactor internals as a proof of principle experiment except for the third origin of corrosive environment. Because a 143 °C and 43% MgCl₂ hot solution SCC test was performed for the samples to simulate the cold-worked SCC phenomena of the internals to show no crack at the laser-peered off strip on the cold-worked side and ten-thousands of cracks at the non-peeled off on the same side, it has been successfully demonstrated that the femtosecond lasers could clearly remove the two SCC origins and could resultantly prevent the cold-worked SCC.

We have developed a laboratory-scale users facility with a compact THz FEL. The FEL operates in the wide wavelength range of 100–1200 μm, which corresponds to 0.3-3 THz. THz radiation from the FEL shows well collimated Gaussian spatial distribution and narrow spectral width of 0.3 μm, which is Fourier transform limited by the estimated pulse duration of 20 ps. The main application of the FEL is THz imaging for bio-medical researches. We are developing THz imaging techniques by 2-D scanning, single pulse capturing with the electro-optic method, and 3-D holography. High power, coherent, and pulsed feature of the FEL radiation is expected to show much better performance in advanced THz imaging of 3-D tomography by comparing with incoherent and weak THz sources. By controlling the optical delay between reference beam and scattered light from an object, we can get its 3-D tomography by the holograms. The coherent and pulse length of the FEL beam is measured to be 3-6 mm. In this paper we will show and discuss the main results of THz imaging with the different methods by using the KAERI compact FEL.

In this study the sections of human tissues were treated under 9.5 μm FEL in the BFEL based on the vibrational spectroscopic investigation that significant differences occur between normal and malignant tissues. Under the defocus condition, the burning of tissue section at some part while other part remains unchanged, suggesting that the FEL can selectively destroy some part of tissue. Vibrational spectroscopic and microscopic methods have shown that the FEL can induce decomposition of malignant tissues. The application of FEL whose wavelength is on the characteristic bands of malignant tissues may provide a new method to kill cancer cells with higher selectivity. For understanding the interactions between FEL and biological tissues, structure changes of substances under irradiation by FEL of 9.414 μm and 6.228 μm were measured using FTIR spectroscopy. The samples include ATP, ADP, AMP, and D-ribose, etc. The FTIR spectra of the molecules before and after irradiation of FEL indicate molecular structure variations of the samples after irradiation of FEL, especially the rearrangement of their hydrogen bond networks, which may be caused by multiple photons process induced by FEL.