Foreign Team Develops New Way To Create Laser Pulses With 1,000 Times More Power!

Recently, scientists in a joint study used computer simulations to demonstrate a new method of compressing light to increase its intensity sufficiently to extract particles from a vacuum and study the nature of matter.
To achieve this, the three research groups have joined forces to create a very special mirror - one that not only reflects light pulses, but also compresses them in time by a factor of more than 200, with the potential for further compression.
The team from the University of Strathclyde, UNIST and GIST came up with a simple idea - to use gradients in the density of plasma (fully ionized matter) to "cluster" photons, similar to a set of stretched out cars! when encountering a steep hill. This could revolutionize the next generation of lasers, increasing their power by more than a million times what is achievable today.
This new method of compressing laser pulses in a plasma is published in the journal Nature Photonics.
The highest-powered lasers in the world have a peak power of about 10 beat watts. In this context, 173 beat-watts (173 x 1015 W) of sunlight reaches the Earth's upper atmosphere, with about one-third of that reaching the Earth's surface. A beat-watt is 1015 W, an ewatt is 1018 W, and a zephyr-watt is 1021 W. The sun produces 4x1026 watts of electricity or 400,000 zettawatts.
High-power lasers produce light pulses of very short duration, typically a few femtoseconds (1 femtosecond = 10-15 seconds), which is achieved by a technique called chirped pulse amplification (CPA), which involves pulse compression, essentially concentrating the energy of a laser pulse over a short period of time, thereby increasing its peak power by many orders of magnitude.
Professor Dino Jaroszynski, from the Department of Physics at the University of Strathclyde, said: "An important and fundamental question is what happens when the intensity of light exceeds levels common on Earth. High-power lasers enable scientists to answer fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the vacuum, and to explore the so-called intensity boundary."
"The application of terawatt to beat-watt lasers to matter is enabling the development of the next generation of laser plasma gas pedals, which are thousands of times smaller than conventional gas pedals. Providing scientists with new tools is changing the way scientific research is conducted. We have established the Scottish Center for Plasma Accelerator Applications (SCAPA) at the University of Strathclyde to advance applications based on high-power lasers."
Professor Min Sip Hur of UNIST said, "The results of this research are expected to be applicable to a variety of fields, including advanced theoretical physics and astrophysics. It could also be used in laser fusion research to help solve the energy problems facing humanity. Our joint Korean and UK team plans to experimentally validate these ideas in the laboratory."
Prof. Hyyong Suk of GIST said, "The plasma can play a similar role in a CPA system as a conventional diffraction grating, but it is a material that will not be destroyed. Therefore, it will enhance conventional CPA technology by including a very simple add-on component. Even if the plasma is only a few centimeters in size, it can be used in lasers with peak powers in excess of 100 million watts."
A billion watts and zerowatts are already very high powers indeed, but their intensity can be greatly increased by simply using lenses or curved mirrors to focus the laser pulse onto a small spot to concentrate its energy. Similar to compressing a laser pulse in time to a shorter duration, the same thing can be done to compress the pulse in space, i.e. focus it to a small spot. So compression, in space or time, allows for an increase in laser pulse intensity in a very general way. Spatial compression can be easily tested by using a lens to focus sunlight on a piece of paper; it will spontaneously combust.
Matter undergoes various changes with increasing intensity. For example, air ionization at visible wavelengths exceeds 1010-1012 W/cm2, and when electrons are subjected to lasers with intensities in excess of 1018 W/cm2, they approach the speed of light, leading to the realm of relativistic optics.
At intensities of 1024 W/cm2 and above, protons approach the speed of light, and particles experiencing a strong laser field react with their own radiation field, which is the current intensity frontier in physics. At intensities above 1029 W/cm2, the well known Schwinger limit, particles are created directly from vacuum light and can be converted directly into matter. This requires AiW to ZiW lasers.
Understanding the nature of matter and vacuum at intensities above 1024 W/cm2 is one of the outstanding challenges of modern physics. High-power lasers also allow the study of astrophysical phenomena in the laboratory, providing unique insights into the interiors of stars and the origins of the universe.