A newly built University of Michigan facility that will have the most powerful laser in the United States will be the scene this week of a first experiment as the nation tries to become competitive once more in the field of centers that have a laser of High power.
A group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) campus will conduct the experiment at the ZEUS facility, short for Zetawatt Equivalent Ultrashort Pulse Laser System. They traveled to Ann Arbor as part of their study of the extremely strong interactions between light and matter, and to see how those interactions can be harnessed to shrink particle accelerators.
When it reaches its highest power, ZEUS will be a 3 petawatt laser.
Three petawatts is “3 followed by 15 zeros,” said Louise Willingale, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan.
And “3 petawatts is 3,000 times more powerful than the US power grid,” he added.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $18.5 million to the University of Michigan for the creation of ZEUS as a federally funded center for international users.
Initially, the facility—housed in a building that houses the University of Michigan’s Gérard Mouroug Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences—will host research teams conducting experiments that require a fraction of the laser’s full power. The power of the system will be increased gradually, and the ZEUS facility is expected to begin conducting its signature experiments in the fall of 2023.
The United States built the world’s first petawatt laser a quarter century ago, but it hasn’t kept up with the more ambitious systems in Europe and Asia. Although ZEUS does not have the same raw power of its foreign contemporaries, its approach will simulate a laser nearly a million times more powerful than its 3 petawatts.
ZEUS will primarily study extreme plasmas, a state of matter in which electrons have enough energy to escape from atoms, creating a sea of charged particles. Almost all of the visible universe is made of plasma. The Sun is an example of a plasma.
The experiments are expected to contribute to understanding how the universe works at the subatomic level and how materials change on fast time scales. The scientists also hope that the experiments will lead to the development of smaller and more compact particle accelerators for medical imaging and treatment.
ZEUS “will have a tremendous range of applications across science, technology, engineering and medicine,” Willingale said.
Applications to use ZEUS will be reviewed by an outside panel of scientists and engineers. Thanks to funding from the NSF, there will be no cost to users whose experimental proposals are selected for research beyond paying their way to the facility.
Proposals will be selected on their scientific merit and technical feasibility, Willingale said.
Franklin Dollar, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, and four UCI graduate students arrived in Michigan last week to begin preparing for their experiment.
“One of the main challenges in our field is access to quality, intense laser light,” Dollar said. “ZEUS will not only be the most powerful laser beam on the continent, but perhaps more importantly, it will provide multiple powerful beams.”
“More than just creating highly energetic plasmas from one laser, there is a second laser beam that can also interact with the plasma,” he said.
ZEUS is an upgrade to the University of Michigan’s 0.5 petawatt laser, known as HERCULES.
While the researchers are excited regarding the birth of ZEUS, they acknowledge that the selection of names does not exactly follow the chronology of Greek mythology.
“HERCULES was the predecessor of ZEUS,” said Willingale. “He is slightly backwards, because Hercules was the son of Zeus. Thus, we are creating the father following the son.”