China on brink of laser-matter breakthrough
Nuclear weapons have already shown that it is possible to convert matter into large amounts of heat and light, but doing it the other way around, converting heat and light into matter, is much more difficult — but this is exactly what laboratories in China and the UK hope to achieve.
If the intended objective is reached, it could open up a whole a new branch of physics, called nuclear photonics, full of technological potentialities still unimaginable.
According to a report by Explica.co, The Station of Extreme Light, which China has been developing in Shanghai since 2018, has made significant progress in its goal of manufacturing lasers so powerful by 2023 that they could break through empty space and create matter.
The Extreme Light Station (SEL) is a laser installation designed to produce a laser with 100 petawatts (PW) of maximum power (one petawatt equals one thousand trillion watts), a goal that is expected to be achieved within two years.
Once completed, the laser will be the most powerful on Earth, with a power 10,000 times greater than that of all the electrical networks in the world combined and with an intensity 10 trillion times greater than that of sunlight, the report said.
