The University of Michigan's newly built facility, which will house the most powerful laser in the United States,
The experiment at ZEUS will be conducted by researchers fromUniversity of California at Irvine. ZEUS is short for Zettawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort pulse laser system or Zettawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort Pulse Laser System. The engineers traveled to Ann Arbor to study the extremely intense interactions between light and matter and how such interactions can be used to reduce particle accelerators.
At its peak, ZEUS will be a laserwith a power of 3 petawatts. Let us remind you that a petawatt is a unit of power that is a multiple of the derived SI unit of power, the watt. 1 petawatt = 1015 watts.
Laser system of ultrashort pulses ZEUSwill explore the physics of the quantum universe as well as outer space. It is also expected to be useful in medicine, electronics and national security issues.
According to the project, ZEUS will become a laser with the mosthigh peak power in the USA and one of the most powerful laser systems in the world. Engineers soon use it to send infrared laser pulses into a helium gas target, turning it into plasma. It, in turn, accelerates the electrons to high energies. These electron beams are then swayed, producing very compact X-ray pulses.
During the first launch, the ZEUS team will start withpower of 30 terawatts (30 trillion watts), which is about 3% of the current most powerful lasers in the US and 1% of the possible maximum power of ZEUS. In late autumn, another launch starts, this time for 500 terawatts. Presumably, the laser itself will begin to be used in 2023.
During the experiment, engineers use a laser togeneration of a beam of high-speed electrons. In addition to exploring the foundations of our understanding of the quantum universe, ZEUS will allow scientists to study what goes on inside some of the most extreme objects in space.
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On the cover:(left to right) Engineer Lauren Weinberg, Researcher John Nees and Research Engineer Galina Kalinchenko while working on the ZEUS laser at the NSF ZEUS Laser Facility at the Michigan Engineering Laboratory. Image Credit & Copyright: Marcin Szczepanski, Michigan Engineering