Petawatt lasers have already allowed scientists to "manipulate materials in new ways, emulate the conditions inside planets, and even split atoms," [1]reports Science magazine . "Now, accelerator physicists have matched that feat, producing petawatt pulses of electrons that could also have spectacular applications..."

> Described in a paper published Thursday in Physical Review Letters , the electron pulses [2]last one-quadrillionth of a second but carry 100 kiloamps of current . "It's a supercool experiment," says Sergei Nagaitsev, an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the work. Richard D'Arcy, a plasma accelerator physicist at the University of Oxford, adds, "It's not just an experimental demonstration of something interesting, it's a steppingstone on the way to megaamp beams." If achievable, those even more powerful beams might begin to perform extraordinary feats such as ripping particles out of empty space, he says...

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> [A]mped-up lasers would open the way to, for example, probing chemical processes as they happen, says Sergei Nagaitsev [an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the experiment]. "These are the easy pickings." An ultraintense electron pulse could also be used to generate plasmas like those seen in astrophysics, such as the jets of matter and radiation that shoot out of certain stellar explosions at near-light-speed. Researchers need only fire the electron beam into the right target. "This is a fantastic relativistic drill," Ferrario says. "The interaction of this with matter could be very interesting."

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> Superintense electron bunches might someday even probe the nature of empty space. They produce a hugely intense electric field, so if one of them were to collide with an ultraintense laser pulse, which also contains a huge electric field, it would expose space to an incredibly strong electrical polarization, D'Arcy notes. If that field is strong enough, it should begin to rip particle-antiparticle pairs out of the vacuum, a phenomenon predicted by quantum physics but never observed. "You can access areas of particle physics that are inaccessible elsewhere," Darcy says.

Thanks to Slashdot reader [3]sciencehabit for sharing the article.



[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/first-petawatt-electron-beam-arrives-ready-rip-apart-matter-and-space

[2] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.085001

[3] https://www.slashdot.org/~sciencehabit