A newly upgraded high-power laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will blaze new trails across many fields of science by recreating the universe’s most extreme conditions, such as those at the heart of stars and planets, in a lab. It is the first high-power laser system to be paired with SLAC’s… Read more
laser
The most powerful laser beam ever created has been recently fired at Osaka University in Japan, where the Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments (LFEX) has been boosted to produce a beam with a peak power of 2,000 trillion watts – two petawatts – for an incredibly short duration, approximately a trillionth of a second or… Read more
Back in the first half of the 20th century, when MIT’s famed Harold “Doc” Edgerton was perfecting his system for capturing fast-moving events on film, the ability to observe changes unfolding at a scale of microseconds — millionths of a second — was considered a remarkable achievement. This led to now-famous images such as one… Read more