The salvaged composition was a portion of Luigi Cherubini's masterpiece Medée. The opera's original score contains an aria that until now had been unperformable due to a large blacked-out area in the sheet music. The piece was brought to the attention of SLAC physicist and associate lab director Uwe Bergmann by a German opera scholar named Heike Cullman who had hoped technology could be the answer to years of speculation about the lost piece.

"If you look at the piece, you can literally see nothing," Bergmann said of the pages of Cherubini's manuscript that are blacked out. "The smudge is completely opaque to the human eye."

Cullman had heard about the technology at SLAC from a previous project of Bergmann's—restoring