What happens when you focus one of the world’s most powerful lasers on a spot so tiny it can be hidden by a human hair? Using the J-KAREN-P laser at the Kansai Photon Science Institute (KPSI) in Japan, a team led by researchers from the National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (QST) in Japan investigated this extreme situation. As they report in the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review Letters, the experimental results reveal a fundamental limit that’s key to optimizing the next generation of ultra-high-intensity lasers. The J-KAREN-P (Japan-Kansai Advanced Relativistic ENgineering Petawatt) laser at KPSI. Credit: QST. “[S]tate-of-the-art high-power laser facilities can produce extreme conditions like no other on earth,” explains Nicholas Dover, a postdoctoral researcher at QST and lead author of the new research paper. “To be precise, there is no other method we know of to concentrate as much energy into such a small spac
brought to you by the American Physical Society