Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences
Board on Physics and Astronomy
Committee on Opportunities in the Science, Applications, and Technology of Intense Ultrafast Lasers
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Congressional Briefings
Thu, Dec 14, 2017
2321 Rayburn House Office Bldg. – 10:00 a.m
and
Thu, Dec 14, 2017
2340 Rayburn House Office Bldg. – 12:00 p.m.
and
Thu, Dec 14, 2017
H-309 The Capitol Bldg. – 1:00 p.m.
and
Fri, Dec 15, 2017
394 Ford House Office Bldg. – 10:30 a.m.
on
Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers:
Reaching for the Brightest Light
The laser has revolutionized many areas of science and society, providing bright and versatile light sources that transform the ways we investigate science and enables trillions of dollars of commerce. Now a second laser revolution is underway with pulsed petawatt-class lasers (1 petawatt: 1 million billion watts) that deliver nearly 100 times the total world’s power concentrated into a pulse that lasts less than one-trillionth of a second. Such light sources create unique, extreme laboratory conditions that can accelerate and collide intense beams of elementary particles, drive nuclear reactions, heat matter to conditions found in stars, or even create matter out of the empty vacuum.
These powerful lasers came largely from U.S. engineering, and the science and technology opportunities they enable were discussed in several previous National Academies’ reports. Based on these advances, the principal research funding agencies in Europe and Asia began in the last decade to invest heavily in new facilities that will employ these high-intensity lasers for fundamental and applied science. No similar programs exist in the United States. Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, assesses the opportunities and recommends a path forward for possible U.S. investments in this area of science.