Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers: Reaching for the Brightest Light
- National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC (United States)
The laser has revolutionized many areas of science and society, providing bright and versatile light sources that transform the ways we investigate science and enable trillions of dollars of commerce. Now a second laser revolution is under way with pulsed petawatt-class lasers (1 petawatt: 1 million billion watts) that deliver nearly 100 times the total world’s power concentrated into a pulse that lasts less than one-trillionth of a second. Such light sources create unique, extreme laboratory conditions that can accelerate and collide intense beams of elementary particles, drive nuclear reactions, heat matter to conditions found in stars, or even create matter out of the empty vacuum. These powerful lasers came largely from U.S. engineering, and the science and technology opportunities they enable were discussed in several previous National Academies’ reports. Based on these advances, the principal research funding agencies in Europe and Asia began in the last decade to invest heavily in new facilities that will employ these high-intensity lasers for fundamental and applied science. No similar programs exist in the United States. This report was commissioned by four U.S. agencies—the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE-SC), and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)—to assess the opportunities and to recommend a path forward for possible U.S. investments in this area of science.
- Research Organization:
- National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Fusion Energy Sciences (FES); US Air Force; US Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research (ONR); USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0016886; N0014-10-G-0589; FA9550-14-1-0391
- OSTI ID:
- 1570365
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-NASEM-13488
- Resource Relation:
- Related Information: Interim report, ISBN: 978-0-309-46933-3, released in January 2018.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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