Photo credit: Marcin Szczepanski | Michigan Engineering
A laser cranking out 2 quadrillion watts sounds like it belongs in a Marvel movie, but it’s real, and it’s firing at the University of Michigan’s ZEUS facility. This machine just snagged the crown as the U.S.’s most powerful laser, and it’s not just flexing for clout—it’s rewriting what science can do.
Power like this is hard to fathom. Two petawatts—2 quadrillion watts—is more juice than the world’s entire electrical grid could muster. But ZEUS doesn’t sustain that energy like a power station. It delivers it in a pulse lasting just 25 femtoseconds, a moment so brief it makes a lightning strike seem like a leisurely stroll.
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Creating a laser like ZEUS is a high-tech juggling act. It begins with a small, precise light pulse, a faint flicker if you will. That pulse is stretched out to manage its energy, making it easier to handle. Then it zips through a titanium-sapphire crystal. Finally, the pulse is crushed back into that 25-femtosecond burst, packing all that power into a single, jaw-dropping moment.
Franklin Dollar, a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine, is leading the first user experiment at this 2-petawatt milestone, and he’s thrilled about ZEUS’s versatility. “One of the great things about ZEUS is it’s not just one big laser hammer, but you can split the light into multiple beams,” Dollar says. His team, alongside ZEUS engineers, is using this flexibility to generate electron beams with energies rivaling those from particle accelerators hundreds of meters long—5 to 10 times higher than anything ZEUS has produced before.
It’s not flawless yet, though. The laser’s crystal has imperfections, capping ZEUS at 2 petawatts instead of its full 3-petawatt potential. However, engineers are stepping up, swapping in a fresh crystal and tweaking optics.
As a midscale-sized facility, we can operate more nimbly than large-scale facilities like particle accelerators or the National Ignition Facility. This openness attracts new ideas from a broader community of scientists,” said John Nees, U-M research scientist in electrical and computer engineering, who leads the ZEUS laser construction.
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