| Title: | Decoding Ultrahigh-Power Lasers |
| Speaker: | Chengyong Feng Laboratory for Laser Energetics University of Rochester Rochester, NY |
| Abstract: |
Lasers have applications in many areas, such as communication, manufacturing, and medicine, that are closely related to our daily lives. Lasers also become indispensable tools in scientific research, for example, in creating conditions with extreme temperature and pressure for studying Laboratory Astrophysics and Planetary Physics.
One of the forefronts in laser R&D is the development of ultrahigh-power lasers with peak power exceeding 10 petawatts (PW) or 10×1015 watts. The backbone technology that enables such high laser power is the so-called chirped pulse amplification (CPA), which was originally demonstrated at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) in 1985 and garnered the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. In this talk, I will review the lasers as electromagnetic waves, construct lasers using fundamental mathematical functions — the sinusoidal functions, explain the necessity of using CPA technology in building high-power lasers, and decode CPA using coherent combination of sinusoidal functions with varying phases. I will then briefly show three recent high-power lasers at LLE with increasing peak power and physical scale. The latest is a laser project called NSF-OPAL that was funded by the National Science Foundation in 2023 to design a 2×25 PW laser facility. Once built, NSF-OPAL will become the most powerful laser in the world. |
| Location: | Palenske 227 |
| Date: | 4/4/2024 |
| Time: | 3:30 PM |
@abstract{MCS:Colloquium:ChengyongFeng:2024:4:4,
author = "{Chengyong Feng}",
title = "{Decoding Ultrahigh-Power Lasers}",
address = "{Albion College Mathematics and Computer Science Colloquium}",
month = "{4 April}",
year = "{2024}"
}