The most powerful laser in the US right now is getting turned on to send its first pulses this week – enabling researchers to get a new level of insight into plasma physics and particle accelerators.
Known as the Zetawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort pulse laser System , it produces an ultra-short, extremely powerful pulse of just 25. A femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second – or to put it another way, a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 31.71 million years.
ZEUS is going to start on a smaller scale and then build up: the first part of the laser to be turned on is known as the high-repetition target area, which uses pulses of a higher frequency but at a lower power. By sending infrared laser pulses from ZEUS into helium gas that then turns into plasma, researchers want to create compact X-ray pulses from highly excited electron beams. These X-ray pulses have the potential to be used as a very precise, very accurate method for imaging soft tissue.