South Korean Researchers Create Most Intense Laser Ever Made

I’m now one step closer to finally writing my name on the face of the moon with a heat ray.

Laser scientists in South Korea have successfully created the highest intensity laser beam ever made, according to a news release over at EurekAlert. The laser has an intensity of 1023 W/cm2, an achievement that’s been “pursued for almost two decades.”

The laser was created at the Center for Relativistic Laser Science (or CoReLs) at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea.

As the Daily Mail puts it, the laser is equivalent to “focusing all the light reaching Earth from the Sun to a spot the size of a red blood cell.”

According to Prof. NAM Chang Hee, Director of CoReLs, this breakthrough should enable scientists to explore new and experimental frontiers:

“With the highest laser intensity achieved ever, we can tackle new challenging areas of experimental science, especially strong field quantum electrodynamics (QED) that has been dealt with mainly by theoreticians. We can explore new physical problems of electron-photon scattering (Compton scattering) and photon-photon scattering (Breit-Wheeler process) in the nonlinear regime. This kind of research is directly related to various astrophysical phenomena occurring in the universe and can help us to further expand our knowledge horizon.”