MRI: Acquisition of a 100 Terawatt Laser Upgrade for Application to Basic and Applied Plasma Physics

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This project will upgrade the existing laser system at the University of Maryland to increase its output pulse energy by a factor of four, making possible a wide range of relativistic physics experiments on a tabletop. The experiments will be run mainly by students and postdocs and will include the types of experiments typically done at much larger laser facilities. These experiments are of both fundamental and practical interest for the development and application of advanced charged particle accelerators, intense laser pulse propagation, and ultra-high field nonlinear optics and plasma physics. The hands-on student and postdoc training obtained in running and maintaining the laser system, and performing and analyzing the experiments, will be invaluable for the development of a workforce in technical areas of increasing importance for science, industry and national defense.Based on recent experiments employing a Maryland-developed laser acceleration scheme at a petawatt-class laser facility, it is expected that the upgraded laser system at the University of Maryland will be able to accelerate electrons to over one billion electron volts (1 GeV), corresponding to nearly the speed of light. This will make possible tabletop x-ray and gamma ray light sources and their applications. In parallel efforts, the increased laser energy of the upgraded system will drive the development of efficient sources of radiation in hard-to-access wavelength regimes, such as terahertz radiation. It will also make possible experiments in laboratory astrophysics, including a new class of magnetic reconnection experiments in the relativistic regime.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.