The cover of Nature magazines a visualization of a laser interacting with a plasma for the production of high-quality electron beams in short distances. Shown are the density contours generated by this process as calculated by VORPAL, a computational plasma physics application developed by Prof. Cary and his collaborators at the University of Colorado and Tech-X Corporation. VORPAL allows experimentalists to understand and optimize their experiments, which in this case were at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. In those experiments, 80 MeV beams were produced within approximately 1 mm of plasma. If this acceleration could be extended for 1 meter, the electron beams would be more energetic than those produced by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's 2 mile long accelerator.

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