A 100-million-watt laser can tear the vacuum

Chinese physicists in Shanghai are about to embark on such a powerful construction that they can tear the vacuum.

The new laser is housed in the Station of Extreme Light (SEL) lab, designed to generate 100 trillion watts (100 petawatts or PW) laser pulses, the International Business Times reported yesterday. This capacity is much larger than the total manpower produced in a year and is only slightly lower than the Earth's energy received from the Sun at any time.

SEL laser machine with a capacity of 100 PW. (Image: Daily Galaxy).

With this kind of energy, physicists can set the stage for research into exposure to large, imaginative temperatures, much like the inner core of stars or even black holes, rather than heat. The level can be seen on Earth.

According to Li Ruxin, a scientist in the research group, the SEL laser can focus a 100 PW laser at a point just three micrometers in diameter, the average size of a bacterium. The intensity in that tiny space will be 1025 times more powerful than the Sun's light to Earth.

These experiments will provide physicists and scientists with unprecedented data on the behavior of particles and shed light on the many mechanisms of action in the universe.

The SEL laser can even tear the vacuum. Li and his collaborators hope to be able to perform laser experiments to tear off their electrons and antimatter as positrons from free space in a phenomenon called "vacuum break . " "The experiment will be very interesting. It means you can create something from scratch , " Li said.

The team will break the record for the laser machine currently available in Shanghai Super Light Laser. In 2016, scientists reached a capacity of 5.3 PW and are in the process of upgrading equipment to increase the PW by 10.