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The University of Texas at Austin will be a key player in LaserNetUS, a new national network of high-intensity operating institutions, ultrafast lasers.
The overall project, funded over two years with $ 6.8 million from the US Department of Energy's Office of Energy Fusion Sciences, aims to help boost the country's overall competitiveness in high-intensity laser research.
UT Austin is home to one of the most powerful lasers in the country, the Texas Petawatt Laser. The university will receive $ 1.2 million to fund its part of the network.
"UT Austin has become one of the world's leading ultra-intense laser lasers, having operated one of the highest-power lasers in the world for the past 10 years," says Todd Ditmire, director of UT's Austin Center for High Energy Density. Science, which houses the Texas Petawatt Laser.
"We can play a major role in the new LaserNetUS network with our record of leadership in this exciting field of science."
High-intensity lasers have a broad range of applications in basic research, manufacturing, and medicine.
For example, they can be used to re-create some of the most extreme conditions in the universe, such as those found in supernova explosions and near black holes. They can generate particles for high-energy physics research or intense X-ray pulses to probe matter as it evolves on ultrafast time scales.
They are also promising in many important areas such as intense neutron bursts to evaluate aging aircraft components, which can be used to treat cancer.
LaserNetUS includes the most powerful lasers in the United States, some of which have powers approaching or exceeding a petawatt. Petawatt lasers generate at least a million trillion watts of power, or nearly 100 times the output of the world's power plants – but only in the briefest of bursts.
Nobel Prize in physics, called chirped pulse amplification, these lasers fire off ultrafast bursts of light shorter than a tenth of a trillionth of a second.
"I am excited to lead the Texas Petawatt science effort into the next phase of research under this new, LaserNetUS funding," says Ditmire.
"This funding will enable us to collaborate with some of the leading optical and plasma physics scientists from around the U.S."
UT Austin, The Ohio State University, Colorado State University, The University of Michigan, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Rochester, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory , Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The US was the dominant innovator and user of high-intensity laser technology in the 1990s, but now Europe and Asia have taken the lead, according to a recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine titled "Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers : Reaching for the Brightest Light. "
Currently, 80 to 90 percent of the world's high-intensity ultrafast laser systems are overseas, and all of the highest-power research lasers currently are also overseas. The report's authors recommended establishing a national network of laser facilities to emulate successful efforts in Europe. LaserNetUS was established for exactly that purpose.
The Office of Energy Fusion Science is a part of the Department of Energy's Office of Science.
LaserNetUS will hold a nationwide call for proposals for access to the network's facilities. The proposals will be reviewed by an independent panel. This call to allow for research in the US to get one of the high-intensity lasers at the LaserNetUS host institutions.
Source: University of Texas at Austin
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