A $4.5 million National Science Foundation grant will fund a multi-university effort to build tools for measuring the world’s most powerful lasers, recreating conditions found inside stars and giant planets for a fraction of a trillionth of a second. The program, titled Diagnostics for Extreme-LIGHT, or DELIGHT, will focus light energy into a spot just a few millionths of a meter across.

“The 2018 and 2023 Nobel Prizes in Physics both recognized the importance of high-power lasers for science and society,” said Douglass Schumacher, a professor. “As these lasers become more powerful, new techniques are required to characterize them, and DELIGHT is dedicated to developing them.”

$4.5 Million NSF Grant Funds Extreme-Light Diagnostics

Douglass Schumacher is participating in a multi-university project bolstered by a $4.5 million grant. The program, formally known as Diagnostics for Extreme-LIGHT, or DELIGHT, is spearheaded by Thomas White, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Reno, with core diagnostic tools anticipated to be completed within three years. Pierre Agostini, 2023 Nobel Laureate and Ohio State Emeritus Professor of Physics, emphasized the scale of this advancement, stating that 40 years ago, Gerard Mourou was seeing the petawatt at the horizon.

He continued that today’s reality is well beyond this vision, but such incredible powers demand a whole new collection of diagnostics to enable quantitative physics. Additional investigators contributing to DELIGHT include researchers at the University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, and University of California, Berkeley.

The 2018 and 2023 Nobel Prizes in Physics both recognized the importance of high-power lasers for science and society.
Douglass Schumacher, Professor at the Department of Physics

Source: https://physics.osu.edu/news/schumacher-receives-nsf-funding-measure-worlds-most-powerful-lasers

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