“You are bound to find new physics,” says Wolfgang Sandner, referring to the Extreme Light Infrastructure, a multisite project in the works in Europe that will start off with several 10-petawatt-class lasers and aims to build a 200-PW laser. “Some of it can be identified, but there will be lots more that we don’t even think about at the moment. ELI would be two orders of magnitude beyond today’s state of the art in laser intensities,” says Sandner, a project steering committee member, director of the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy in Berlin, and coordinator of a network of 26 European national laser physics laboratories. Research topics planned for ELI include attosecond (10-18 s) science, nuclear physics, laser particle accelerators, and the structure of the vacuum.
“ELI is the first truly international laser research project in the world,” claims Sandner, who puts free-electron lasers...
