An international team of physicists has developed a practical method to exponentially amplify the intensity of high-power laser light.

Researchers Discover Breakthrough Method to Achieve Extreme Light Intensities In a groundbreaking achievement that promises to redefine the frontiers of laser physics, an international consortium of physicists has unveiled a practical method to exponentially amplify the intensity of high-power laser light. This advance, detailed in a forthcoming publication in Nature, heralds a new era for experiments probing the fundamental interactions between light and vacuum at… https://scienmag.com/researchers-discover-breakthrough-method-to-achieve-extreme-light-intensities/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

“An international team of physicists has achieved a significant advance in laser science, demonstrating for the first time a practical route to dramatically boosting the intensity of high-power laser light. The results, published in Nature, could unlock the route towards creating the most intense light ever produced in a laboratory, opening the door to experiments that […] The post Physicists Achieve First-Time Route to Dramatic Laser Light Intensity Boost appeared first on Human Progress. https://humanprogress.org/physicists-achieve-first-time-route-to-dramatic-laser-light-intensity-boost/ View article View summary #^Physicists Achieve First-Time Route to Dramatic Laser Light Intensity Boost “An international team of physicists has achieved a significant advance in laser science, demonstrating for the first time a practical route to dramatically boosting the intensity of high-power laser light. The results, published in Nature, could unlock the route towards creating the most intense light ever produced in a laboratory, opening the door to experiments that probe the fundamental laws of physics by directly interacting light with the quantum vacuum… Using the Gemini laser at the CLF, the team created extremely bright ultraviolet light through an unusual process. In simple terms, they fired an intense laser at a cloud of charged particles (a plasma), causing it to behave like a rapidly moving mirror. This can be likened to shining a flashlight at a mirror that is rushing toward you at enormous speed. The reflected light becomes compressed and more energetic—similar to how the pitch of a siren rises as an ambulance speeds past. In this case, the ‘mirror’ is moving so fast that Einstein’s theory of relativity comes into play, boosting the light to much higher energies. This effect is known as relativistic harmonic generation. The team also demonstrated a way to concentrate this light even further, in what they call a Coherent Harmonic Focus. An analogy is using a magnifying glass to focus sunlight onto a tiny point so intense it can burn paper. Here, instead of sunlight, many different colors (wavelengths) of laser light are brought together and focused into an extremely small region, creating a huge concentration of energy. This advance could eventually allow scientists to explore one of the most extreme frontiers of physics: how light and matter interact at the most fundamental level, described by a theory called quantum electrodynamics (QED).” From Nature. The post Physicists Achieve First-Time Route to Dramatic Laser Light Intensity Boost appeared first on Human Progress.