The most intense laser beam is to set a new record. The record-setting beam measures 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter. It contains 300 terawatts of power. That's 300 times the capacity of the entire U.S. electricity grid. The laser beam's power is concentrated to a 1.3-micron speck about 100th the diameter of a human hair. A human hair is about 100 microns wide. If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory. The pulsed laser beam lasts just 30 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second. The laser can produce this intense beam once every 10 seconds, whereas other powerful lasers can take an hour to recharge. To achieve this beam, the research team added another amplifier to the HERCULES laser system, which previously operated at 50 terawatts. HERCULES is a titanium-sapphire laser that takes up several rooms at U-M's Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. Light fed into it bounces like a pinball off a series of mirrors and other optical elements. It gets stretched, energized, squeezed and focused along the way.

Such intense beams could help scientists develop better proton and electron beams for radiation treatment of cancer, among other applications. In addition to medical uses, intense laser beams like these could help researchers explore new frontiers in science. At even more extreme intensities, laser beams could potentially "boil the vacuum," which scientists theorize would generate matter by merely focusing light into empty space. Some scientists also see applications in inertial confinement fusion research, coaxing low-mass atoms to join together into heavier ones and release energy in the process.

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