World’s most powerful laser to be built in Europe

Telegraph : The world’s most powerful laser is slated to be built by 13 European Union member countries as part of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project. “This laser will be 200 times more powerful than the most powerful lasers that currently exist,” said John Collier, a scientific leader for the ELI project and director of the Central Laser Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. With an estimated cost of about $1.5 billion, the ELI ultra-high field laser is scheduled to be completed by the end of the decade, although where it is to be built is undecided. The laser will consist of 10 beams that produce 200 petawatts of power, “equivalent to the power received by the Earth from the sun focused onto a speck smaller than a tip of a pin,” writes Richard Gray for the Telegraph. Scientists plan to use the laser to study the mysterious particles in the vacuum of space and to produce laser-based treatments for cancer and medical diagnostics.