Three. Two. One. Fire!
Nothing seemed to have happened. There was not a sound in the room. Yet the shot was successful, as evidenced by a perfectly circular gray spot that had suddenly appeared on a black screen in the control room.
The shot was the world's most powerful laser light emission: 10 petawatts (PW), in other words, 10 quadrillion (million billion) watts. It's equivalent to one-tenth of the power emanating from the Sun that is received on Earth, or 6 million times more than a European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) nuclear reactor. However, the reason the control room didn't quake was that this power is delivered over an extremely short period: Around 25 femtoseconds (or 25 millionths of a billionth of a second) and across a width of just three micrometers.
This fire-breathing "dragon" dwells within its lair, a 2,400-square-meter hall at the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) in Măgurele, a town located 10 kilometers south of Bucharest, Romania; near a nuclear research center that had long housed a Soviet reactor. It actually has several heads: Two that "spit fire" at a level of 10 PW (once per minute maximum); two others at 1 PW (once per second); and two more at 100 terawatts (TW, or 0.1 PW)) (10 times per second). Built by the French company Thalès, it cost around a third of the €320 million that was needed to build the laboratory, 80% of which was financed by the European Union (EU) and the rest by the country of Romania itself. It also has two "brothers" in Hungary and the Czech Republic (which were not built by Thalès). These are less powerful, but were also born of the same EU desire to install such cutting-edge infrastructures in less scientifically rich countries to help their development.
To celebrate the anniversary of the first 10 PW shot at a solid target, on April 13, 2023, Thalès invited journalists to discover the inner workings of this technological wonder, whose purpose is not to replace the sun or nuclear power plants, but to carry out physics experiments under extreme conditions; which have given the ELI its suffix, NP, for Nuclear Physics. Every year, around 15 experiments are carried out over a period of around one month.
"By illuminating gases, we're approaching certain astrophysical conditions," explained Domenico Doria, the head of the ELI-NP experimental target areas, in the middle of which sit silver-plated metal containers containing a vacuum, in which gases or solids will be atomized to create plasmas or particle soups.
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