European Union To Spend $900 Million Building Super Lasers More Powerful Than Any Yet Constructed.
On the coattails of CERN’s success with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Europeans and the world at large have another grand science project to be excited about: the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project involving 40 research and academic institutions. The project’s goal is to build powerful la
On the coattails of CERN’s success with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Europeans and the world at large have another grand science project to be excited about: the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project involving 40 research and academic institutions. The project’s goal is to build powerful la
sers — two in
Romania and the Czech Republic and a third in Hungary. These lasers
will progressively serve as prototypes for a fourth more powerful laser —
the Ultra-High Field Laser — whose location hasn’t been decided yet,
though the UK is the likely candidate.
The expected date for the first laser facility to become operational is sometime in 2017.
These lasers will be intense enough to perform electron dynamics experiments at very short time scales or venture into relativistic optics, opening up an entirely new field of physics for study. Additionally, the lasers could be combined to generate a super laser that would shoot into space, similar to the combined laser effect of the Death Star in the Star Wars trilogy, though the goal is to study particles in space, not annihilate planets.
The project coordinator for the Romanian site, Nicolae-Victor Zamfir, told Bloomberg that each laser will be 10 times more powerful than any laser currently in existence, such as the one at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Other possible research directions are under consideration, including radiography, cancer therapies, and even accelerating radioisotope decay, but it seems that for now the focus is on getting the facilities built for basic research rather than reaching out just yet for proposals on potential applications.
The expected date for the first laser facility to become operational is sometime in 2017.
These lasers will be intense enough to perform electron dynamics experiments at very short time scales or venture into relativistic optics, opening up an entirely new field of physics for study. Additionally, the lasers could be combined to generate a super laser that would shoot into space, similar to the combined laser effect of the Death Star in the Star Wars trilogy, though the goal is to study particles in space, not annihilate planets.
The project coordinator for the Romanian site, Nicolae-Victor Zamfir, told Bloomberg that each laser will be 10 times more powerful than any laser currently in existence, such as the one at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Other possible research directions are under consideration, including radiography, cancer therapies, and even accelerating radioisotope decay, but it seems that for now the focus is on getting the facilities built for basic research rather than reaching out just yet for proposals on potential applications.
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