Some things really are bigger in Texas—the petawatt laser built by scientists and engineers at the University of Texas at Austin, for one. “[It] is the highest-power laser in the world,” says Todd Ditmire, director of the Texas Petawatt Laser, which held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on 28 August.
The laser has a peak power of 1.2 PW, or 1.2 × 1015 watts. New amplification technology, namely, a combination of nonlinear optics and doped glass to amplify a broad range of wavelengths, has shrunk the pulse duration down to 165 femtoseconds, from 600 fs at the only other petawatt lasers yet built—one in the UK and one, since decommissioned, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The shorter pulse time means target materials can be heated faster “than anything expands,” Ditmire says, “and you can get plasmas with solid—or higher—densities.”
A key area of study will be fundamental properties of such dense...
