Scientists Are Creating Lasers So Powerful They Could Turn Light Into Matter
Scientists Are Creating Lasers So Powerful They Could Turn Light Into Matter
For over 11 decades we have known that matter and energy are interchangeable. The development of nuclear power has shown us that matter can be converted into energy, but converting energy into matter has so far proven a lot more difficult.
The battlefield for such an achievement is at the end of the most powerful lasers ever envisioned, currently being planned and built in a number of different countries. Three projects top the “one to watch list” of the laser world, prepared by the journal Science. They are China’s Station of Extreme Light (SEL), Russia’s Exawatt Center for Extreme Light Studies (XCELS), and the Department of Energy’s Optical Parametric Amplifier Line (OPAL).
These three lasers are planned to completely annihilate the current record for laser power, which is 5.3 million billion watts or 5.3 petawatts (PW) and obtained by Ruxin Li and colleagues at the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF). Li is also behind SEL and hopes that by 2023 his team could reach the goal of a 100-PW laser.
The Russian instrument is still in the design phase of development but is more daring in its target. The researchers hope it will achieve 180 PW. Both SEL and XCELS are expected to work on the same principle. They shoot a series of pulses (four 30-PW pulses for SEL and a dozen 15-PW pulses for XCELS) and combine them into a single extra-powerful one.
More:
http://www.iflscience.com/physics/scientists-are-creating-lasers-so-powerful-they-could-tear-matter-out-of-empty-space/
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