For over 11 decades we have known that matter and energy are interchangeable. The development of nuclear power has shown us that matter can be converted into energy, but converting energy into matter has so far proven a lot more difficult.
The battlefield for such an achievement is at the end of the most powerful lasers ever envisioned, currently being planned and built in a number of different countries. Three projects top the “gone to watch list” of the laser world, prepared by the journal Science. They are China’s Station of Extreme Light (SEL), Russia’s Exawatt Center for Extreme Light Studies (XCELS), and the Department of Energy’s Optical Parametric Amplifier Line (OPAL).
These three lasers are planned to completely annihilate the current record for laser power, which is 5.3 million billion watts or 5.3 petawatts (PW) and obtained by Ruxin Li and colleagues at the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF). Li is also behind SEL and hopes that by 2023 his team could reach the goal of a 100-PW laser.
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