Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers Reaching for the Brightest Light (2018) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction and Technical Summary
1 Introduction and Technical Summary
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1.1 INTRODUCTION In 1898, 3 years after the discovery of X-rays, 17 years before Einstein derived the notion of stimulated light amplification, and 62 years before the first laser was demonstrated, H.G. Wells created the enduring popular image of a tool that p rojects enormous energy as intense and invisible beams of light: It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able .
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These mostly in volved lasers that could deliver a lot of total energy but not necessarily deliver the energy rapidly. High-intensity laser science evolved following further advances in laser technology and engineering in the 1990s that made it possible to concentrate the energy of a laser into a short pulse and focus it to a small area.
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scientists from universities and national laboratories assembled a report entitled Science and Applications of Ultrafast, Ultraintense Lasers: Opportunities in Science and Technology Using the
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In the intervening years, additional National Academies' studies in related areas have continued to emphasize the science opportunities enabled by high-intensity lasers, the benefits of network organizing within the community, and the larger benefits to society from leadership in laser science and engineering. These reports include AMO 2010: Controlling the Quantum World,6 Frontiers in High Energy Density Physics,7 and the recent report entitled Optics and Photonics: Essential Technologies for our Nation.8 4 P
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in the last decade to propel them towards the development goal of an exawatt class laser, 1,000 times more powerful than current petawatt lasers, achieved by concentrating kilojoules of energy into 10 fs.9 If this power is focused to a micrometer diameter spot it will spur research relevant to nuclear physics, high energy physics, and related fields accessible at intensities up to 1025W/cm2. The current ELI project is building nearly a dozen petawatt-class lasers in three new laser facilities in Eastern Europe.
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Fourth, a decade of flat federal funding has eliminated the budget flexibility needed to seed new discoveries, while economic expansion overseas has been ac companied by significant growth in foreign research infrastructure and program funds. The recommendations laid out in the Summary and Chapter 7 of this report all address these points by urging the creation of a cross-agency multi cale broad s participant program to re-establish leadership-level research in high intensity laser science in the United States.
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1.4 HIGH-INTENSITY LASER TECHNOLOGIES Petawatt lasers and the associated fields of high-intensity science are enabled by the technology of optical power compression that can concentrate joules of optical energy into a single packet only tens of microns in each dimension. The history of laser technical advances that led to this is described in Chapter 3 and in the associated Appendixes A and B
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(An example of a petawatt laser pulse studied in this report is 100 Joules of energy delivered in 100 femtoseconds, at a wavelength of 800 nm, focused to a spot 10 microns across. If we could see the pulse itself then it would appear as a tissue-paper-thin pancake of energy in the form of an electric field traveling through space at the speed of light.
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Introduction and Technical Summary 13 The total energy carried by this pulse of light, 100 Joules, is approximately the kinetic energy of a pitched baseball.b b AP photo of Don Larsen delivering a pitch during his World Series perfect game October 8, 1956, from http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/yankees/larsen-plays-perfect-game world-series-1956-article-1.2382988. Its peak power, the energy per unit time, is one petawatt, which is about one hundred times the world's total rate of energy consumption.c A petawatt is also the combined total solar power striking the states of California, Arizona, and Nevada on a sunny day at noon.
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When that much light is concentrated in such a small spot, the power per unit area, called the intensity, is ten-trillion trillion W/m2. The brightest point at the interior of the sun is much less intense.d In fact, this is about a million times the intensity equivalent of a thermonuclear explosion at ground zero.e d NASA, "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/469368main_sun_lay ers_unlabeled_full.jpg.
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The current limits are due to the optical elements with the lowest damage thresholds, which are the special dispersion optics required for pulse compression in CPA or OPCPA systems. More details can be found in Chapter 3 and in Appendix A4.
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The European Union and member states have committed $1 billion over the next 10 years to this project, which will provide the science community with multiple laser facilities tailored to the broad needs of the different science areas. 1.7 SCIENCE AND APPLICATIONS WITH HIGH-INTENSITY LASER LIGHT The science and applications chapters 5 and 6 summarize the extensive case for the continued development and deployment of high-intensity lasers for research and applications.
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in high-intensity experiments have been reported recently in the focus of petawatt lasers exceeding 1021 W/cm2.12 The magnetic fields produced in these plasmas exceed 109 G, far larger than fields created using other means. 1.7.3 Unique Secondary Sources Several sections of both the science and applications chapters of this report are devoted to the use of high-intensity laser pulses to make secondary sources of particle beams or radiation.
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Major projects to advance this technol ogy have been funded in the United States by the Department of Energy Office of High Energy Physics, and currently the only approved petawatt laser for the DOE Office of Science is intended to demonstrate length-scaling of GeV-class electron accelerators using cascaded sections of plasma wakefield acceleration (Figure 3.1)
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An emerging area with a potential enabling impact in the >$100 billion range is in the use of high-intensity lasers to implement "tabletop X-ray lasers" through coherent upconversion.14 More information about this and other applications in medicine and manufacturing are in Chapter 6. 14 A laser is upconverted by a nonlinear element inserted into its beam, which generates an output laser frequency that is greater than the input laser frequency.
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