NOW THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: Lasers are getting ten times more powerful every 3 years, soon Exawatt lasers will unlock fusion and more.
Multi-petawatt power capability projects.
* Chinese initiative at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) is advancing towards a 10-PW laser facility
* 100 Petawatt Station for Extreme Light (SEL) at the proposed Shanghai Coherent Light Facility (SCLF).
* Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) activated their multi-kJ Advanced Radiographic Capability (ARC) PW scale laser and the PETAL laser at CEA began operations toward the 2-PW level in 2017.
* In South Korea, the Gwangju Institute for Science and Technology is presently commissioning a 4 PW capability that should be available to users in 2017.
* The University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics continues to work on the OPAL multi-phase laser initiative that could evolve from 5-PW to 75-PW capability.
* European ESFRI roadmap project, the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI), consisting of ELI-Beamlines (Czech Republic), ELI-Nuclear Physics (Romania), and ELI-ALPS (Hungary), is rapidly approaching initial operations.
ICUIL and ICFA (International Committee for Future Accelerators), another arm of the IUPAP Working Groups, are now jointly promoting the development of efficient, highpower, laser technology to enable laser-driven wakefield acceleration for future high energy accelerators.
It’s impossible not to notice how far we’ve fallen behind the Chinese.