Prospects of PEARL 10 and XCELS Laser Facilities

摘要

The goal of the XCELS project in Russia is establishing a large research infrastructure - the Exawatt Center for Extreme Light Studies. The core of the planned infrastructure will be a new unique source of light having the power of about 0.2 Exawatt. This source constitutes a 12 channel x 15 PW laser system based on technique of optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA). The corresponding laser architecture was developed at the Institute of Applied Physics in Nizhny Novgorod where the first Petawatt-class OPCPA laser in the world, called PEARL, was launched in 2007 and a multi-Petawatt system is now under construction. The fundamental processes of laser-matter interaction at Exawatt power belong to an absolutely new branch of science that will be the principal research task of the infrastructure. There will open up opportunities for studying the space-time structure of vacuum, nonlinear QED phenomena and unknown processes at the interface of the high-energy physics and the high-field physics.