Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers

Reaching for the Brightest Light

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• Publisher: National Academies Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780309467728
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Physical Sciences

The laser has revolutionized many areas of science and society, providing bright and versatile light sources that transform the ways we investigate science and enables trillions of dollars of commerce. Now a second laser revolution is underway with pulsed petawatt-class lasers (1 petawatt: 1 million billion watts) that deliver nearly 100 times the total worlds 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. Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers assesses the opportunities and recommends a path forward for possible U.S. investments in this area of science.

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• SUMMARY
• 1 INTRODUCTION AND TECHNICAL SUMMARY
• 2 STEWARDSHIP IN HIGH-INTENSITY LASER SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
• 3 CURRENT AND FUTURE INTENSE SOURCE TECHNOLOGY
• 4 INTERNATIONAL LANDSCAPE
• 5 SCIENCE MOTIVATION
• 6 APPLICATIONS
• 7 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
• APPENDIXES