Univ. of Michigan’s ZEUS will be most powerful laser in US

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — A newly constructed University of Michigan facility that will be home to the most powerful laser in the United States is hosting its first experiment this week as the nation seeks to become competitive again in the realm of high-power laser facilities.

The experiment will be conducted at ZEUS — short for Zettawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort pulse laser System — by researchers from the University of California, Irvine. They traveled to Ann Arbor as part of their study of extremely intense interactions of light and matter, and how such interactions can be harnessed to shrink particle accelerators.

At the height of its power, ZEUS will be a 3-petawatt laser.

Three petawatts is “3 with 15 zeroes after it,” said Louise Willingale, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Michigan.

And “3 petawatts is 3,000 times more powerful than the U.S. power grid,” she said.

Michigan was awarded $18.5 million by the National Science Foundation to establish ZEUS as a federally funded international user facility.

Initially, the facility — housed in a building that is home to U-M’s Gérard Mourou Center for Ultrafast Optical Science — will host research teams conducting experiments that use a fraction of the laser’s full power potential. The system gradually will ramp up, and ZEUS is expected to begin its signature experiments in the fall of 2023.

The U.S. built the world’s first petawatt laser a quarter-century ago, but hasn't kept pace with more ambitious systems in Europe and Asia. While ZEUS doesn’t feature the same raw power as its contemporaries overseas, its approach will simulate a laser that is roughly 1 million times more powerful than its 3 petawatts.

ZEUS primarily will study extreme plasmas, a state of matter in which the...