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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
High-power lasers have been promoted for decades for research aiming at two important applications: The compression and heating of nuclear fusion fuel, and the realization of compact particle accelerators. The pursuit of realizing these applications has brought high-power lasers to university-scale laboratories and led to discoveries about the nature of light-matter interaction in an intensity regime never reached before. I will overview this field of research, now known as Nuclear Photonics, and specifically tell about the interaction of relativistic light with wavelength-scale objects, the role of the atomic number in coupling relativistic laser pulses to MeV particles, and on tests of QED in the non-linear regime.
Host: Sasi Palaniyappan (sasi@lanl.gov) and Kirk Flippo (kflippo@lanl.gov)