The US Has a New Most-Powerful Laser

slon writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-powerful-laser.html

The ZEUS laser facility at the University of Michigan has roughly doubled the peak power of any other laser in the U.S. with its first official experiment at 2 petawatts (2 quadrillion watts).

At more than 100 times the global electricity power output, this huge power lasts only for the brief duration of its laser pulse-just 25 quintillionths of a second long.

"This milestone marks the beginning of experiments that move into unexplored territory for American high field science," said Karl Krushelnick, director of the Gerard Mourou Center for Ultrafast Optical Science, which houses ZEUS.

Research at ZEUS will have applications in medicine, national security, materials science and astrophysics, in addition to plasma science and quantum physics. ZEUS is a user facility-meaning that research teams from all over the country and internationally can submit experiment proposals that go through an independent selection process.

"One of the great things about ZEUS is it's not just one big laser hammer, but you can split the light into multiple beams," said Franklin Dollar, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, whose team is running the first user experiment at 2 petawatts.

"Having a national resource like this, which awards time to users whose experimental concepts are most promising for advancing scientific priorities, is really bringing high-intensity laser science back to the U.S."

Dollar's team and the ZEUS team aim to produce electron beams with energies equivalent to those made in particle accelerators that are hundreds of meters in length. This would be 5-10 times higher energy than any electron beams previously produced at the ZEUS facility.

"We aim to reach higher electron energies using two separate laser beams-one to form a guiding channel and the other to accelerate electrons through it," said Anatoly Maksimchuk, U-M research scientist in electrical and computer engineering, who leads the development of the experimental areas.

They hope to do this in part with a redesigned target. They lengthened the cell that holds the gas that the laser pulse rams into, helium in this experiment. This interaction produces plasma, ripping electrons off the atoms so that the gas becomes a soup of free electrons and positively charged ions. Those electrons get accelerated behind the laser pulse-like wakesurfers close behind a speedboat-a phenomenon called wakefield acceleration.

Light moves slower through plasma, enabling the electrons to catch up to it. In a less dense, longer target, the electrons spend more time accelerating before they catch up to the laser pulse, enabling them to hit higher top speeds.

This demonstration of ZEUS's power paves the way for the signature experiment, expected later this year, when the accelerated electrons will collide with laser pulses coming the opposite way. In the moving frame of the electrons, the 3-petawatt laser pulse will seem to be a million times more powerful-a zettawatt-scale pulse. This gives ZEUS its full name of "Zettawatt Equivalent Ultrashort laser pulse System."

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