The laser system of the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), delivered a petawatt of power in a pulse just 40 femtoseconds long at a pulse rate of one hertz – one pulse every second. A petawatt is 1015 watts, a quadrillion watts, and a femtosecond is 10-15 second, a quadrillionth of a second. No other laser system has achieved this peak power at this rapid pulse rate.
“This represents a new world record,” said Wim Leemans of Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD)
The BELLA design draws on years of laser plasma accelerator research conducted by LOASIS. Unlike conventional accelerators that use modulated electric fields to accelerate charged particles such as protons and electrons, laser plasma accelerators generate waves of electron density that move through a plasma, using laser beams to either heat and drill through a plume of gas or driving through plasma enclosed in a thin capillary in a crystalline block like sapphire. The waves trap some of the plasma’s free electrons and accelerate them to very high energies within very short lengths, as if the accelerated electrons were surfing on the near-light-speed wave.
LOASIS reported its first high-quality electron beams of 100 million electron volts (100 MeV) in 2004 and the first beams of a billion electron volts (1 GeV) in 2006 – in a sapphire block just 3.3 centimeters long. Planning for BELLA began shortly thereafter.
The BELLA laser is expected to drive what will be the first laser plasma accelerator to produce a beam of electrons with an energy of 10 billion electron volts (10 GeV). Before being converted to other uses, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center achieved 50-GeV electron beams with traditional technology, but required a linear accelerator two miles long to do it. By contrast, the BELLA accelerator is just one meter long, supported by its laser system in an adjacent room.
The BELLA laser system has already demonstrated compressed output energy of 42.4 joules in about 40 femtoseconds at 1 Hz. Its initial peak power of one petawatt is twice that of lasers recently said to produce pulses more powerful than that consumed by the entire U.S. “at any instant in time.” “Instant” is the operative word, since the BELLA laser’s average power is just 42.4 watts, about what a typical household light bulb uses. The enormous peak power results from compressing that modest average power into an extremely short pulse.
This story is reprinted from material from Berkeley Lab, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.