Laser physicists are getting ready to attack a new limit. One hundred petawatt lasers. If they succeed their lasers may rip virtual particles out of the nothingness.
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Current lasers can be pretty extreme. They are capable of firing energies in the petawatt range. If you take this powerful laser and focus it into a small space it can be completely devastating. Matter suffers and gets ripped apart. But this isn't enough for laser physicists. Their ambitions are bigger. They plan on using laser so powerful that under certain circumstances they could potentially rip apart reality itself. And suddenly it seems that it could be possible. We just need new sophisticated mirrors.
Nowadays, all of humanity uses roughly 18 terawatts of energy (a terawatt is a thousand times more than a petawatt). Nonetheless, the most extreme lasers we currently have are capable of firing a beam with the energy of roughly 5 to 10 petawatts. The trick is to have the laser fire for an insanely short time, somewhere between one picosecond and a few femtoseconds (ten to the power of minus 15 seconds). At that moment the energy of the laser is truly monstrous. And it will only get more monstrous.
When the energy of a laser beam achieves around 10 to the power of 12 watts per centimeter squared matter gets turned into plasma. Current best lasers can create a beam with the energy of roughly 10 to the power of 22 watts per centimeter squared. But if laser scientists can achieve energies of around 10 to the power of 29 watts per centimeter squared strange things will start happening. Such a laser will probably rip virtual electrons from vacuum itself. In other words, such a laser will rip reality apart and mine real electric charge out of nothing.
The problem is to build a laser that would create such energies. It mostly a question of having a material that could survive for long enough to focus the beam. This is where the new plasma mirrors come onto the scene. Truthfully, scientists were talking about plasma mirrors for a while now. Plasma is something like a gas but it is made from electrically charged particles in which free electrons just fly around. When an extreme laser beam hits plasma it will get reflected. At first, it seemed that plasma mirrors won't work because we couldn't keep them in the needed shape. But now scientists used supercomputers to find a way. It's still only theory but it should work.
So, all we need to do now is rip reality apart and hope that nothing nasty comes out to haunt us.
Sources:
- https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.105001
- https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/trampoline-mirror-may-push-laser-pulse-through-fabric-of-the-universe/
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