The same energy produced by a million nuclear power plants concentrated in a millionth of a billionth of a second, i.e. in a femtosecond, and an equivalent pressure of 10 million Eiffel Towers on the tip of a finger: these are some of the incredible numbers of the most powerful laser in the world. world, capable of concentrating incredible quantities of energy in a tiny space and in an almost infinitesimal time.
It is called Eli, an acronym for Extreme Light Infrastructure and it was built in Romania, just outside Bucharest, based on the idea of Nobel Prize winner Gérard Mourou, awarded for Physics in 2018.
With the power of 10 Petawatts, i.e. 10 million billion watts , the Eli laser "is a unique infrastructure of its kind, with a new generation of lasers that could have applications in many fields", said the Italian researcher Domenico Doria, head of the department of high-power laser experiments at the Eli-Np.
Born thanks to approximately 300 million in European funding, Eli was designed to make an innovative tool and a place to do research and develop possible applications available to the European and international scientific community.
The technology underlying the laser, developed by the French company Thales, promises to have important implications in many sectors, such as the biomedical one, the production of fuels for new nuclear fission systems, the reduction of waste from power plants, the elimination of debris space, researches microscopic natural phenomena, such as chemical reactions within cells.
In the future, mini-lasers in hospitals to open up to new therapies
Develop new diagnostic methods for breast cancer, reducing the harmful effects of X-rays, or replace the current complex particle accelerators used for hadrontherapies in hospitals with laser systems: they are two possible concrete applications coming from the new generation of lasers made by the French company Thales.
The new lasers were inaugurated at the Extreme Light Infrastructure located in Romania, the infrastructure just outside Bucharest that hosts the most powerful laser in the world.
"To date, the most common technique for diagnosing breast cancer is mammography, which uses ray imaging by Eli-Np.
"But our studies - she added - indicate that using new laser technologies it may soon be possible to reduce X-ray doses and at the same time improve diagnoses".
It is just one of the applications that could become possible with new types of lasers,
Another application in the biomedical field could come in hadrontherapies, in which heavy particles such as protons are used to destroy tumor cells.
"To generate such particles it is currently necessary to build large and complex particle accelerators near hospitals, instruments that require large investments and the stable presence of many specialized personnel", said Bernhard Quendt, chief technology officer of Thales.
According to the expert, in the not too distant future accelerators could be replaced by much smaller and easier to manage instruments, such as lasers.
Laser pulses can in fact produce a kind of waves and accelerate particles and direct them precisely.
"We are convinced it could be the future - said Quendt - because equipping oneself with a laser system of this type will be much simpler than having particle accelerators, it will cost much less and require much less space".
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