…radiation from the entire electromagnetic spectrum? Or rather, anything with sufficient energy to excite the electrons, i.e. visible light and beyond?
What, like X-Rays?
No, unless you are talking reflection at very slight incident angles.
This is one of the reasons that X-Ray lasers aren’t practical at this time.
It’s extremely difficult to reflect x-rays; the only way they can do it in x-ray telescopes is to have the mirrors at a grazing angle (about a degree) to the incoming rays. And even that doesn’t work for gamma rays, for which you can’t really produce optics at all.
Above a certain energy level, the way photons interact with matter changes. Visible light and most of what we call ultraviolet can temporarily raise the energy level of an electron’s binding state to an atom, and then be reemitted again. Beyond the energy level of where a photon ionizes an atom, knocking an electron away altogether, the rules change.
I didn’t say that they didn’t exist - I said they weren’t practical.
From here.
What happens then?