ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) – A newly constructed University of Michigan facility that will house the most powerful laser in the United States is hosting its first experiment this week as the nation tries to improve in the field of high-power laser facilities.
The experiment is being conducted at the ZEUS – short for Zettawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort Pulse Laser System – by researchers at the University of California, Irvine. They traveled to Ann Arbor as part of their study of extremely intense light-matter interactions and how such interactions can be used to miniaturize particle accelerators.
At its peak, ZEUS will be a 3 petawatt laser.
Three petawatts is “3 followed by 15 zeros,” said Louise Willingale, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science in Michigan.
And “3 petawatts is 3,000 times stronger than the US grid,” she said.
Michigan received $18.5 million from the National Science Foundation to establish ZEUS as a federally funded international user facility.
Initially, the facility, housed in a building that houses UM’s Gérard Mourou Center for Ultrafast Optical Science, will house research teams conducting experiments that utilize a fraction of the laser’s full power potential. The system will be gradually ramped up and ZEUS is expected to start its signature experiments in autumn 2023.
The US built the world’s first petawatt laser a quarter century ago, but it hasn’t kept pace with more ambitious systems in Europe and Asia. While ZEUS doesn’t have the same raw power as its overseas contemporaries, its approach will simulate a laser roughly 1 million times more powerful than its 3 petawatts.
ZEUS will primarily study extreme plasmas, a state of matter in which the electrons have enough energy to escape the atoms and create a sea of charged particles. Almost the entire visible universe consists of plasma. The sun is an example of a plasma.
Experiments are designed to help understand how the universe works at the subatomic level and how materials change on rapid time scales. Scientists also hope they will lead to the development of smaller and more compact particle accelerators for medical imaging and treatment.
ZEUS will have “a huge range of applications in science, technology, engineering and medicine,” Willingale said.
Proposals to use ZEUS are evaluated by an external panel composed of scientists and engineers. Because of NSF funding, there are no costs to users whose experiment proposals are selected to conduct research, other than providing their own travel expenses to the facility.
Proposals will be selected based on scientific merit and technical feasibility, Willingale said.
Franklin Dollar, associate professor at Cal-Irvine’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, and four UCI graduate students came to Michigan last week to begin preparations for their experiment.
“One of the biggest challenges in our field is access to high-quality, intense laser light,” said Dollar. “ZEUS will not only be the most powerful laser beam on the continent, but perhaps more importantly, deliver multiple powerful beams.
“Rather than just creating high-energy plasmas from one laser, there’s a second beam that can also interact with the plasma,” he said.
ZEUS is an upgrade of the University of Michigan’s 0.5 petawatt laser known as HERCULES.
While the Michigan researchers are excited about the birth of ZEUS, they are aware that their naming conventions don’t exactly match Greek mythology chronology.
“HERCULES preceded ZEUS,” Willingale said. “It’s a bit backward because Hercules was the son of Zeus.
“So we build father after son.”
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