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takyon writes:

Researchers have created a model that suggests that the peak energy of gamma ray lasers could be massively increased:

Previous simulations have suggested that as laser peak powers reach lofty petawatt levels, the laser field itself can start to run into fundamental limits. Those limits are tied to strong-field quantum electrodynamic (QED) effects, which can, through complex feedbacks, eventually sap the energy of the laser field driving them. As a result, it's generally been assumed that efficient gamma-ray production from these new petawatt-peak-power lasers would be limited to energies well under a billion electron volts (GeV).

Now, researchers from Sweden, Russia and the United Kingdom have re-crunched the numbers, and suggested that this fundamental limit might not be so fundamental after all (Phys. Rev. X, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevX.7.041003). The team's modeling suggests that, by tweaking the laser pulse intensity and duration in the right way, it's possible to tune the system to minimize the energy-depleting effects and maximize the creation of gamma rays. This, says the team, would allow the radiation from the high-power laser to be "converted into a well-collimated flash of GeV photons."

Thus far, the scenario, requiring lasers with peak powers on the order of 10 PW, has been proved out only on the computer. But the authors hope to see it verified in practice as such powerful lasers start [to] come on line with the maturing of the ELI and other projects—a development that, they maintain, "could enable a new era of experiments in photonuclear and quark-nuclear physics."

Original Submission