Sometimes, opportunities fall into our laps when we’re least expecting them. A team of CERN surveyors, in collaboration with the Institute of Plasma Physics in Prague (IPP), has developed a pioneering laser beam while working on a particularly challenging alignment system. “While developing the alignment system for the HIE-ISOLDE accelerator, we discovered that the system generating a structured laser beam had astonishing optical properties”, explain Jean-Christophe Gayde (CERN, EN-SMM-ESA) and Miroslav Šulc (IPP), the system’s inventors. “We didn’t initially plan to develop a generator for this kind of laser beam, but the results of our research were very encouraging.”