Harnessing the power of the world's most powerful lasers
Speaker: Professor Andrew Harrison, Director of Science, ELI-Laser
This is a talk as part of the Cardiff Scientific Society's programme, which is cosponsored by IOP Wales. Attendance is free for IOP members.
The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) facility is a new institute established in Central Europe, distributed over three sites in Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, with the objective of providing the scientific community in Europe as a whole with access to the highest performance lasers in the world. These offer some of the highest peak intensity light pulses ever produced, which can be used to generate and study matter under extreme conditions, for example plasmas and, ultimately perhaps matter and antimatter from a vacuum.
Such plasmas have the potential to provide clean energy through nuclear fusion and are already offering new means of creating high-energy particle beams, which in turn offer new diagnostics and therapies for cancer or methods of imaging materials.
The facility also provides probes of extremely fast processes, at the scale of motion of electrons during chemical and electronic processes, giving new insights into catalysis and biological processes at the most fundamental level.
Registration is not required for this event. Please see the programme details here.