NSF advances plan to build world's most powerful laser

The National Science Foundation has awarded a round of funding toward a total of $13.7 million to advance the development of the world's most powerful laser into its final design phase. The NSF Optical Parametric Amplifier Line laser facility, being developed with participation by UC Irvine researchers, will serve as a shared resource by the global scientific community in fields including particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology.

The NSF OPAL laser facility is proposed to be constructed at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Rochester, New York. When completed, it will consist of two 25-petawatt lasers that will fire at extremely short durations, measuring millionths of a billionth of a second, and for that short period of time the laser will be a thousand times more powerful than the global power grid.

The ZEUS laser at the University of Michigan, another system with ties to UC Irvine physicists, holds the current record for the strongest laser in the United States at two petawatts.

According to UC Irvine research group leader Franklin Dollar, professor of physics and astronomy, the extraordinarily high power of the NSF OPAL laser will unlock new capabilities in areas such as particle acceleration and advanced light sources, laser-driven nuclear physics and laboratory astrophysics and planetary physics. The tool will also enable new work in high-field physics and quantum electrodynamics to better understand how subatomic particles like electrons behave and the conditions and nature of the universe in the first moments following the Big Bang.

The particle acceleration and advanced light source research and development thrusts being carried out by Dollar's team are intended to create a better understanding of the way to structure high-intensity light to enable the most powerful electron accelerator on the planet.

"We are working to generate the strongest electric and magnetic fields ever generated in a laboratory setting, conditions only found in the most extreme places in the universe, to learn how to harness it for high-energy ion acceleration," Dollar said.

"The ongoing support from the NSF will enable us to finalize the design to build the world's most powerful laser while pushing forward adjacent technologies of optics and photonics related to semiconductor manufacturing, fusion energy, advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence," he added.