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Record-breaking laser pulses

Record-breaking laser pulses

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By Wisse Hettinga



Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a laser that produces the strongest ultra-short laser pulses to date. In the future, such high power pulses could be used for precision measurements or materials processing

  • Researchers have developed a laser that can produce extremely short pulses with peak powers up to 100 megawatts and 550 watts of average power.
  • This was made possible by an optimized arrangement of the mirrors in the laser and improvements of a special mirror, which causes the laser to emit pulses.
  • In the future, the record-breaking laser pulses could, for example, be used for precision measurements.

The word laser usually conjures up an image of a strongly concentrated and continuous light beam. Lasers that produce such light are, in fact, very common and useful. However, science and industry often also require very short and strong pulses of laser light. These pulses can be used to machine materials or to create high harmonic frequencies up to X-rays, which can help to make extremely fast processes in the attosecond range (a billionth of a billionth of a second) visible.

A team of researchers at ETH Zurich led by Ursula Keller, professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics, have now set a new record for such laser pulses: at 550 watts of average power they surpass the previous maximum by more than 50 percent, which makes them the strongest pulses ever created by a laser oscillator. At the same time, they are extremely short – they last less than a picosecond, or a millionth of a millionth of a second – and exit the laser in a regular sequence at a high rate of five million pulses per second. The short pulses reach peak powers of 100 megawatts (which, in theory, would be enough to power 100.000 vacuum cleaners for a short time). The researchers recently published their results in the scientific journal Optica.

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