Europe's projects.....

Lasers are helping to push the boundaries of physics...

The European Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) facilities built in the 2010-2020 period in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania have managed to push light intensities to levels which had not been reached before. And this enables us to reach electromagnetic field strengths where the laws of physics change from a classical regime to so-called quantum electrodynamics (QED), enabling us to explore this world in far more detail.

The attempt to reach some of the current ultimate frontiers of physics is gaining in intensity. At energies near the limit of 10²⁵ Watts per square centimetre, nature starts to behave differently and reveals to us some of her ultimate secrets. One of these is the creation of matter from pure energy – this is called pair creation in the absolute vacuum. It involves the generation of particles of matter – an electron and its anti-particle, the positron, from apparently no matter at all.

The discovery of lasers as a source of coherent light – light with a single frequency and in phase – in the 1960s led to our ability to achieve power concentrations of electromagnetic photon intensities previously out of our reach. Milestones on the road to this goal included harnessing crystalline optical media and the mastery of techniques that allow us to reach such high intensities while preserving the integrity of the system. Amplification techniques for laser light make use of “chirped pulse amplification” (CPA), whereby power gains are achieved by “stretching” the light wave before amplifying it, and then recompressing it in a final stage, so that equipment used in the amplification process is not damaged.

But beware - projects can have their pitfalls - read about how the extreme laser project is faring now HERE.