Zettawatt-exawatt lasers and their applications in ultrastrong-field physics

By T. Tajima, G. Mourou. 2001

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since its birth, the laser has been extraordinarily effective in the study and applications of laser-matter interaction at the atomic and molecular level and in the nonlinear optics of the bound electron. In its early life, the laser was associated with the physics of electron volts and of the chemical bond. Over the past fifteen years, however, we have seen a surge in our ability to produce high intensities, 5 to 6 orders of magnitude higher than was possible before. At these intensities, particles, electrons, and protons acquire kinetic energy in the megaelectron-volt range through interaction with intense laser fields. This opens a new age for the laser, the age of nonlinear relativistic optics coupling even with nuclear physics. We suggest a path to reach an extremely high-intensity level 10 26 28 Wcm 2 in the coming decade, much beyond the current and near future intensity regime 10 23 Wcm 2 , taking advantage of the megajoule laser facilities. Such a laser at extreme high intensity could accelerate particles to frontiers of high energy, teraelectron volt, and petaelectron volt, and would become a tool of fundamental physics encompassing particle physics, gravitational physics, nonlinear field theory, ultrahigh-pressure physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. We focus our attention on high-energy applications, in particular, and the possibility of merged reinforcement of high-energy physics and ultraintense laser.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82ff921f971e5995593a005aa9232e4699989720

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Citations in the corpus

Optics in the relativistic regime (2006, unknown): “The largest lasers that could be used for a pump at present are the National Ignition Facility NIF in the US and the Laser Megajoule in France Tajima and Mourou, 2002 .”
Nonlinear collective effects in photon-photon and photon-plasma interactions (2006, background): “The evolution of laser intensity is truly astounding (Mourou et al., 1998, 2005; Perry and Mourou, 1994; Tajima and Mourou, 2002) (see Fig.”
Exact Solution of the Landau-Lifshitz Equation in a Plane Wave (2008, background): “electron-positron pairs are spontaneously created from vacuum (here −e 38 ].”
Electron-positron pairs in physics and astrophysics: from heavy nuclei to black holes (2009, methodology): “The recent development of laser technology and the invention of the chirped pulse amplification (CPA) method have led to a stunning increase of the light intensity (10(22)W/cm(2)) in a laser focal spot [270, 271].”
Laser-driven particle and photon beams and some applications (2010, background): “Such experimental conditions are likely to be realized by exawatt lasers (Mourou et al 2006, Tajima and Mourou 2002), which are presently being designed and were described in sections 5.1.”