NSF Advances Plan to Build World's Most Powerful Laser

The National Science Foundation has awarded funding to advance the development of the Optical Parametric Amplifier Line (OPAL) laser facility into its final design phase. This facility, with participation from UC Irvine researchers, is intended to be the world's most powerful laser and will serve as a shared resource for the global scientific community in fields such as particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. The extraordinarily high power of the NSF OPAL laser is expected to unlock new capabilities in areas like particle acceleration, advanced light sources, laser-driven nuclear physics, and laboratory astrophysics, as well as enabling new work in high-field physics and quantum electrodynamics.