{"id":3843,"date":"2012-12-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-04T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpdev.hmc.edu\/physics\/2012\/12\/04\/using-high-power-pulsed-lasers-to-generate-hot-dense-environments-a-fusion-testbed\/"},"modified":"2012-12-04T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-12-04T00:00:00","slug":"using-high-power-pulsed-lasers-to-generate-hot-dense-environments-a-fusion-testbed","status":"publish","type":"physics_colloquium","link":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/research\/colloquium\/using-high-power-pulsed-lasers-to-generate-hot-dense-environments-a-fusion-testbed\/","title":{"rendered":"Using High-Power, Pulsed Lasers to Generate Hot, Dense Environments:  A Fusion Testbed"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"page-featured-image\" class=\"wp-block-image is-style-alignleft\" data-pic=\"pic-534.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/22\/2023\/01\/pic-534.png\" alt=\"Promotional image for talk: Elements of a successful scientific talk\" data-pic=\"pic-534.png\" \/><\/figure>\n<p><strong>Speaker(s):<\/strong> Tom Donnelly<\/p>\n<p>When they where first invented in 1960, someone quipped that \u201cLasers are a solution waiting for a problem.\u201d That challenge has been met so effectively that today lasers are ubiquitous in everyday life, to say nothing of their presence in laboratories.  A series of scientific, engineering, and material-science breakthroughs have allowed lasers to become ever more powerful, and today laser pulses are produced which reach a peak power in excess of 1 PW ((10^{15}) W).  For comparison, this is many hundred times the power carried on the entire US electrical grid. I will discuss some of the basic ideas used to build these high-power lasers, and then will describe work that I have done at HMC, the University of Texas at Austin, and Imperial College, London studying the interaction of high-power laser pulses with micron-scale targets.  In particular, I will describe how we have tailored the laser-matter interactions to produce hot, dense systems that can act as a fusion plasma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-3843","physics_colloquium","type-physics_colloquium","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/physics_colloquium\/3843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/physics_colloquium"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/physics_colloquium"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/physics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}