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Record-Breaking Laser Pulses Allow Astrophysical Phenomena to Be Studied in the Lab - SciTechDaily

Record-Breaking Laser Pulses Allow Astrophysical Phenomena to Be Studied in the Lab - SciTechDaily

Record-Breaking Laser Pulses Allow Astrophysical Phenomena to Be Studied in the Lab - SciTechDaily
May 06, 2021 2 mins, 30 secs

Researchers have demonstrated a record-high laser pulse intensity of over 1023 W/cm2 using the petawatt laser at the Center for Relativistic Laser Science (CoReLS), Institute for Basic Science in the Republic of Korea.

It took more than a decade to reach this laser intensity, which is ten times that reported by a team at the University of Michigan in 2004.

“This high intensity laser will allow us to examine astrophysical phenomena such as electron-photon and photon-photon scattering in the lab,” said Chang Hee Nam, director of CoReLS and professor at Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology.

In Optica, The Optical Society’s (OSA) journal for high impact research, the researchers report the results of years of work to increase the intensity of laser pulses from the CoReLS laser.

Studying laser matter-interactions requires a tightly focused laser beam and the researchers were able to focus the laser pulses to a spot size of just over one micron, less than one fiftieth the diameter of a human hair.

Researchers created high-intensity pulses using the petawatt laser (pictured) at the Center for Relativistic Laser Science (CoReLS) in the Republic of Korea.

This high intensity laser will allow scientists to examine astrophysical phenomena such as electron-photon and photon-photon scattering in the lab.

“This high intensity laser will let us tackle new and challenging science, especially strong field quantum electrodynamics, which has been mainly dealt with by theoreticians,” said Nam.

The new accomplishment extends previous work in which the researchers demonstrated a femtosecond laser system, based on Ti:Sapphire, that produces 4 petawatt (PW) pulses with durations of less than 20 femtoseconds while focused to a 1 micrometer spot.

This laser, which was reported in 2017, produced a power roughly 1,000 times larger than all the electrical power on Earth in a laser pulse that only lasts twenty quadrillionths of a second.

To produce high-intensity laser pulses on target, the generated optical pulses must be focused extremely tightly.

This system involves deformable mirrors — which have a controllable reflective surface shape — to precisely correct distortions in the laser and generate a beam with a very well-controlled wavefront.

A laser-matter interaction chamber for proton acceleration, in which the focal intensity over 1023 W/cm2 was demonstrated by tightly focusing a multi-petawatt laser beam with an F/1.1 off-axis parabolic mirror.

“Our years of experience gained while developing ultrahigh power lasers allowed us to accomplish the formidable task of focusing the PW laser with the beam size of 28 cm to a micrometer spot to accomplish a laser intensity exceeding 1023 W/cm2,” said Nam.

The researchers are using these high-intensity pulses to produce electrons with an energy over 1 GeV (109 eV) and to work in the nonlinear regime in which one electron collides with several hundred laser photons at once.

The researchers continue to develop new ideas for enhancing the laser intensity even more without significantly increasing the size of the laser system.

One way to accomplish this would be to figure out a new way to reduce the laser pulse durationG

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