English

Launching the world's strongest laser at a cost of 320 million euros

187
2024-04-03 18:05:29
See translation

   Beijing, April 1st (Reporter Liu Xia) - The world's most powerful laser has been activated recently. On March 31st, the Physicist Organization Network reported that the system can enable laser pulses to reach a peak of 10 terawatts (1 terawatt=100 terawatts=1015 watts) within 1 femtosecond (1000 trillions of a second), which is expected to promote revolutionary progress in multiple fields from medicine to basic physics and space.

   The high-tech center to which this laser belongs is located in Romania, mainly funded by the European Union, with a cost of 320 million euros, utilizing the invention of French scientists such as Gerald Muru.

   Scientists have been committed to manufacturing more powerful lasers. In the mid-1980s, the Muru team invented Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) technology, which can increase the power of lasers while maintaining their intensity. Its working principle is to stretch an ultra short laser pulse in time, amplify it, and then squeeze it together again to create the shortest and strongest laser pulse to date.

   Mulu was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing a method for producing high-intensity, ultra short light pulses. This technology is expected to be widely applied in fields such as nuclear physics and particle physics, medicine, etc. In the medical field, this technology has promoted the development of cataract and refractive surgery.

   Muru pointed out that they will start with a tiny glowing "seed" with minimal energy, which will be magnified millions of times. They will use these ultra-high voltage pulses to generate more compact and cheaper particle accelerators to destroy cancer cells. Other possible applications include processing nuclear waste by reducing its radioactive duration, cleaning up accumulated debris in space, and so on.

Related Recommendations
  • SpaceX will sell satellite lasers to competitors that can accelerate space communication

    SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell stated at a meeting on Tuesday that the company has started selling satellite lasers for fast space communication to other satellite companies.SpaceX's thousands of Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit use inter satellite laser links to transmit data to each other in space at the speed of light, so that the network can provide more extensive Internet coverage wo...

    2024-05-10
    See translation
  • China University of Science and Technology proposes composite cold field 3D printing technology for liquid crystal elastomers

    Recently, Associate Professor Li Mujun from the School of Engineering Sciences and the Institute of Humanoid Robotics at the University of Science and Technology of China, together with researchers such as Professor Zhang Shiwu, has made significant progress in the field of intelligent material 3D printing. The research team proposed composite cold field 3D printing technology and successfully pre...

    02-25
    See translation
  • The research team has developed a mechanical luminescent touch screen that can work underwater

    The optical properties of afterglow luminescent particles in mechanical luminescence and mechanical quenching have attracted much attention in various technological applications. A group of researchers from Pohang University of Science and Technology has attracted attention by developing an optical display technology with ALP that can write and erase messages underwater.The team is composed of Pro...

    2024-03-08
    See translation
  • Continuation of the Term of President and CEO of Jena Germany

    Recently, the supervisory board of Jenoptik, a leading German laser technology company, announced an important decision: to extend and confirm the term of Dr. Stefan Traeger as Chairman of the Executive Board, with a new term of three years starting from July 1, 2025, and the contract validity period correspondingly extended to June 30, 2028. Dr. Stefan Traeger has been serving as the President ...

    2024-09-06
    See translation
  • Researchers propose NeuFlow: an efficient optical flow architecture that can solve high-precision and computational cost issues

    Real time and high-precision optical flow estimation is crucial for analyzing dynamic scenes in computer vision. Although traditional methods are fundamental, they often encounter issues with computation and accuracy, especially when executed on edge devices. The emergence of deep learning has driven the development of this field, providing higher accuracy, but at the cost of sacrificing computati...

    2024-03-23
    See translation