Researchers are working on the most powerful laser in the world, which is now functional in a research center in Romania. The equipment has the potential to bring significant progress in various fields, including space exploration and health, reports Interesting Engineering.
French technology company Thales is using Nobel prize-winning ideas to make the laser work at the European Union’s Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) center near Bucharest.
ELI’s equipment produces the shortest and most powerful laser pulses the world has ever seen by amplifying, compressing and extending in time an extremely short laser pulse. This helped the researchers overcome a crucial limitation of lasers: increasing power while keeping the intensity safe.
The technology has already been used in corrective eye surgery, but it also made it possible for researchers to continuously increase the power of lasers.
Despite the fact that it has been around for over 60 years, experts believe that lasers still offer a vast unexplored potential. If their energy efficiency can be further increased, they could open an incredible new potential in the energy, medical and industrial sectors.
In 2012, the Berkeley Laboratory in California received a laser accelerator from the French company Thales, called BELLA (Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator). By concentrating all of its energy into a pulse lasting about thirty femtoseconds (a femptosecond is equal to 10 to the -15th power of a second), BELLA was the first laser to produce a petawatt of power, or one million billions of watts.
Six years later, Gerard Mourou – a long-time collaborator of the Thales group and power laser researcher Donna Strickland – shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the method known as chirped pulse amplification, which produces ultra-short laser pulses of extremely high intensity, with a maximum intensity of approximately one terawatt.
The laser system developed by Thales at ELI boasts an unprecedented peak power of 10 petawatts (equivalent to an incredibly short flash from a hundred thousand billion light bulbs), obtained in less than a femtosecond.
Application potential in essential fields
High-power lasers find various medical applications, offering a precise treatment of cancer through proton or electron beam therapy and using the “flash” effect for a less damaging but effective treatment. In addition, the researchers claim that they play a crucial role in medical imaging.
“We will use these ultra-intense pulses to produce much more compact and less expensive particle accelerators” to destroy cancer cells, Mourou said in a conversation with AFP.
In industry, these lasers are invaluable for detecting sub-millimeter defects in thick components and for scanning cargo to identify hazardous substances. In addition, high power lasers are very promising to revolutionize the energy sector.
“Nuclear fusion offers hopes of providing clean, safe and waste-free energy, and it is now clear that short-pulse, very high-power lasers will play a key role in future energy plans,” said Christophe Simon-Boisson, line manager of products for scientific and industrial lasers at Thales.
In addition, such powerful lasers could be used to clean up garbage that accumulates in space or to treat nuclear waste by shortening the time of their radioactive disintegration.
Tags: laser Magurele life powerful laser world marks beginning era field health space
-
