The World’s Most Powerful Laser Beam

At a research center in Romania, engineer Antonia Toma activates the most powerful laser beam in the world, promising revolutionary advancements across various fields from medicine to space.

Housed in a facility near the capital city of Bucharest, the laser machine, operated by the French company Thales, utilizes the Nobel Prize-winning innovation. Researcher Gerard Mourou (France) and Donna Strickland (Canada) won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for harnessing laser power to create high-precision devices in eye surgery and industrial applications.

Within the research center’s control room, Toma checks a series of indicators before initiating a countdown. On the other side of the glass, arrays of long red and black boxes contain two laser systems. The scale of operations at the research center is immense. The system can reach a maximum power level of 10 petawatts (one petawatt equals 10 to the power of 15 watts) in an incredibly short period of time, on the scale of femtoseconds (one femtosecond equals one quadrillionth of a second). Engineers had to carefully install 450 tons of equipment to achieve this extraordinary performance, according to Franck Leibreich, Thales’ laser solutions management director.

Mourou admits he is deeply moved after an extraordinary journey from the United States, where he worked for 30 years, to realize the project in Europe. The project originated in the 2000s from the larger European Union ELI infrastructure project.

The high-tech building housing the research center, with a construction cost of $350 million, was primarily funded by the European Union. Thales states this is the largest investment in scientific research in Romania. Meanwhile, countries including France, China, and the United States are pushing forward their own projects to produce even more powerful laser machines.

Scientists are always striving to create even more powerful laser machines. However, in the mid-1980s, they encountered a barrier preventing them from increasing power without affecting light beam amplification. That’s when Mourou and Strickland, his then-students, invented the technique called Chirped-Pulse Amplification (CPA), enabling safe power increase and amplification.

This technique operates by stretching ultra-short laser pulses, amplifying them, and compressing them again, creating the shortest and most powerful laser pulses in the world. CPA has been applied in eye surgery but could pave the way for scientists to further expand the boundaries of laser technology. “We will use this ultra-powerful pulse to produce more compact and affordable particle accelerators to destroy cancer cells,” says Mourou.

Other potential applications include treating radioactive waste by reducing the time of radioactive activity or cleaning up space debris. For Mourou, the past century belonged to electrons, while the 21st century is the era of lasers.