The Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator or BELLA is a
laser built by the
Thales Group and owned and operated by the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States Department of Energy National Labs, United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, t ...
.
On 20 July 2012 BELLA fired a 40
femtosecond
A femtosecond is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to 10 or of a second; that is, one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth, of a second. For context, a femtosecond is to a second as a second is to about 31. ...
laser
pulse, establishing a
world record for most powerful laser.
BELLA was designed and built by Thales as part of the Laser and Optical Accelerator Systems Integrated Studies (LOASIS) program at LBNL. The LOASIS group studies the application of high-powered lasers to build compact
particle accelerators. The BELLA laser was developed for the purposes of studying this principle.
The idea is that a laser which delivers a large amount of
power in a very short pulse can cause
ionization in a gas followed by
plasma oscillation.
As a result the gas will emit
electron bundles which can be used for
medical imaging
Medical imaging is the technique and process of imaging the interior of a body for clinical analysis and medical intervention, as well as visual representation of the function of some organs or tissues (physiology). Medical imaging seeks to rev ...
or
materials research.
On 20 July 2012, BELLA fired a laser pulse with a duration of 40 femtoseconds and a repetition frequency of 1
hertz. The pulses had a compressed output
energy of 42.2
joule, making the power output of the laser 1
petawatt:
This result established BELLA as the highest peak power laser in the world (at a 1 Hz repetition rate).
In December, 2014, a team of researchers accelerated electrons using BELLA up to an energy of 4.25 GeV—the absolute highest energies recorded to date using a compact accelerator.
References
Research lasers
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