Source: AFP
“Ready? Signal sent!”
In the control room of a research center in Romania, engineer Antonia Toma activates the world’s most powerful laser, which promises revolutionary advances in everything from health to space.
The laser at the center, near the Romanian capital Bucharest, is operated by the French company Thales, using Nobel Prize-winning inventions.
France’s Gerard Mourou and Canada’s Donna Strickland have won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for harnessing the power of lasers for advanced precision instruments in corrective eye surgery and industry.
“The sharp beams of laser light have given us new opportunities to deepen our knowledge of the world and shape it,” the Nobel Academy report said.
In the center, in front of a wall of screens displaying beams of light, Toma checks a series of pointers before starting the countdown.
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On the other side of the glass, long rows of red and black boxes house two laser systems.
“I won’t lie. From time to time, things can get a bit stressful,” the 29-year-old Thomas told AFP during a recent press visit.
“But it’s also very happy to work here. And we’re very happy to get results,” as teams of international researchers come to the center, he added.
“Incredible Odyssey”
Nobel laureate Mourou confessed that he was “very moved” by his “incredible odyssey” — from the United States where he spent 30 years, to carry out this work in Europe.
It was born in the 2000s from the European Union’s ELI project on Infrastructure.
“We start from a small bright seed with very, very little energy, which will be amplified millions and millions of times,” said Mourou, 79, trying to give a sense of the “huge step that has been taken,” the “phenomenal forces” that was achieved. .
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Source: AFP
Scientists have always pushed to create more powerful lasers.
By the mid-1980s, however, they had hit a wall as they could not increase the power without destroying what was strengthening the beam.
It was then that Mourou and his then-student Strickland devised a technique called Chirped-Pulse Amplification (CPA), which managed to boost power while keeping the volume safe.
It works by stretching an extremely short laser pulse in time, amplifying it and compressing it back together, creating the shortest and most intense laser pulses the world has ever seen.
It has already been applied to corrective eye surgery, but it has also paved the way for scientists to continue pushing the limits of laser power.
“We will use these extremely intense pulses to produce much more compact and less expensive particle accelerators” to destroy cancer cells, Muru said.
Age of the laser
Other potential applications include treating nuclear waste by reducing its radioactivity or cleaning up debris that accumulates in space, he added.
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For Mourou, just as the last century was that of the electron, the 21st century will be that of the laser.
The scale of the operation at the research center is dizzying.
Source: AFP
The system is capable of peaking at 10 petawatts (10 to the power of 15 watts) for an extremely short period of time, on the order of a femtosecond (one millionth of a billionth of a second).
It took “450 tons of equipment” — carefully installed — to achieve an “excellent level of performance,” said Franck Leibreich, Thales’ managing director of laser solutions.
The high-tech building that houses the center cost 320 million euros ($350 million), mostly funded by the EU.
Thales considers it the largest investment ever made in scientific research in Romania.
Meanwhile, countries such as France, China and the United States are already advancing their own projects to build even more powerful lasers.
Source: AFP