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posted by martyb on Saturday July 04 2020, @03:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the gonna-need-much-faster-sharks dept.

Toward lasers powerful enough to investigate a new kind of physics:

In a paper that made the cover of the journal Applied Physics Letters, an international team of researchers has demonstrated an innovative technique for increasing the intensity of lasers. This approach, based on the compression of light pulses, would make it possible to reach a threshold intensity for a new type of physics that has never been explored before: quantum electrodynamics phenomena.

[...] Installed in the Advanced Laser Light Source (ALLS) facility at INRS, the researchers limited themselves to an energy of 3 joules for a 10-femtosecond pulse, or 300 terawatts (1012 W). They plan to repeat the experiment with an energy of 13 joules over 5 femtoseconds, or an intensity of 3 petawatts (1015 W). "We would be among the first in the world to achieve this level of power with a laser that has such short pulses," says Professor Kieffer.

"If we achieve very short pulses, we enter relativistic problem classes. This is an extremely interesting direction that has the potential to take the scientific community to new horizons," says Professor Kieffer.

Journal Reference:
S. Yu. Mironov, S. Fourmaux, P. Lassonde, et al. Thin plate compression of a sub-petawatt Ti:Sa laser pulses, Applied Physics Letters (DOI: 10.1063/5.0008544)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 04 2020, @02:20PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday July 04 2020, @02:20PM (#1016110) Journal

    I guess there's a lower limit on the energy required for a false-vacuum collapse simply from the fact that it didn't yet happen from vacuum fluctuations in the past 12 billion years.

    Unless many-worlds is true and we are simply living in the branch where the vacuum didn't collapse, no matter how unlikely that was.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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