WIREDGOV

A cutting-edge laser amplifier that can supply bursts of laser energy with power equivalent to that of a full-sized power station has been developed, built and supplied for a new international project in the Czech Republic. Developed by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), this project brings in £2.2 million for the UK economy.

The laser head was delivered to the new Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) facility in the first major contract of its kind between STFC’s Centre for Advanced Laser Technology and Applications (CALTA) and the Czech Republic’s Institute of Physics (IoP).

Worth £2.2 million to the UK, the contract creates a world-class laser capability for ELI, a multi-million euro facility in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania.

The laser amplifier head, which builds on the world-leading DiPOLE laser development from the STFC team, can supply bursts of 10 joules of laser energy for a brief instant, ten times every second.(DiPOLE has ceramic materials inside the head which allow light to be amplified to immense power for brief instants of time,) Each laser burst has power equivalent to that of a full-sized power station. It is expected to stimulate development of new technologies by laser, optical, vacuum, electronics and other industries.

Following a week’s intensive installation work, the completion was signed off by Bedrich Russ, Chief Scientist with ELI Beamlines, and Justin Greenhalgh, Manager of STFC’s CALTA.

Bedrich Russ said, “We are delighted with the outcome ofthis highly successful project and look forward to putting the laser head to use in one the four massive laser systems that make up ELI Beamlines here in the Czech Republic. Having access to this cutting edge technology is helping us to produce a state of the art facility for scientists from around the world to use. The excellent level of co-operation between STFC and IoP has set a solid foundation for future work.”

CALTA capitalises on the advanced technology developed in the STFC’s Central Laser Facility (CLF). Its mission is to develop a next generation laser technology platform for use in both industry and existing international large scale laser infrastructures.

Professor John Collier, Director of the CLF, said “The laser platform will benefit new build laser infrastructure projects, including ELI, and will drive new laser-based applications in industry, including advanced material treatments and energy production.”

“DiPOLE technology not only enables high power laser operation at high repetition rates of many pulses per second” said Professor Collier, “but also demonstrates high efficiency operation, with at least 10% efficiency in producing laser power from electricity, compared to conventional systems that are typically much less than 1% efficient.”

ELI will become a world-class laser facility open to academic researchers to do advanced science experiments. The ELI lasers will operate at ten times a second (ten hertz) and amplify ultrashort pulses of laser energy to power levels above 1 petawatt (a petawatt is a billion megawatts), the instantaneous equivalent of 2 million power stations per pulse. This is an ambitious step forward compared to earlier generations of petawatt lasers, such as the Vulcan laser in the Central Laser Facility at the STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which produce only one laser pulse every 20 minutes.

Being able to operate high power lasers at high repetition rate is key to developing applications such as medical imaging and radiotherapy for industrial use.

Notes for editors

Contact

Marion O’Sullivan 
STFC Press Officer
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Tel: +44 (0)1235 445627

STFC’s Central Laser Facility and CALTA

STFC’s Central Laser Facility is at the forefront of global development and scientific exploitation of high power lasers. Through CALTA it is translating the heritage of this scientific leadership into direct benefit, to the UK economy and to society. Its aim is to fuel UK economic growth through new cutting-edge technologies.

The Central Laser Facility (CLF) is a partnership between its staff and the large number of members of UK and European universities who use the specialised laser equipment provided to carry out a broad range of experiments in physics, chemistry and biology.

Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI)

ELI is a new pan-European Research Infrastructure and part of the European ESFRI Roadmap. It is a laser facility that aims to host some the most intense lasers world-wide, develop new interdisciplinary research opportunities with light from these lasers and secondary radiation derived from them, and make them available to an international scientific user community.

The facility will be based on four sites. Three of them are presently being implemented in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, with an investment volume exceeding 850 million Euro, mostly stemming from the European Regional Development Funds.

In Dolni Brezhany, near Prague, Czech Republic, the ELI-Beamlines facility will mainly focus on the development of short-pulse secondary sources of radiation and particles, and on their multidisciplinary applications in molecular, biomedical and material sciences, physics of dense plasmas, warm dense matter, laboratory astrophysics. In addition, the pillar will utilize its high-power, high-repetition-rate lasers for high-field physics experiments with focused intensities of about 10²³ W/cm2, investigating exotic plasma physics, and non-linear QED effects