Thales intense lasers: From planet Earth to Mars!

For more than 20 years, Thales has developed laser systems with unprecedented performances to meet the needs of the most demanding scientific applications. Beyond their exceptional technical performances, these systems are extremely reliable and easy-to-use.

 

  • In 2012, Thales constructed the BELLA laser, the first turn-key intense laser, offering a power of 1 Petawatt[1] to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (California).
  • Currently, in Romania, Thales is completing the installation of another turn-key Petawatt laser and was recently awarded a contract by the European research programme ELI-NP (Extreme Light Infrastructure for Nuclear Physics) to produce two intense lasers of 10 Petawatts each.
  • Thales also recently signed a Cooperation Agreement on Intense Laser Systems with the Russian Institute for Applied Physics in Nizhny Novgorod (IAP) with the objective of overcoming the current limit in particle acceleration.
  • Finally, very far from our planet, a Thales-built laser, integrated into the ChemCam[2] instrument on the “Curiosity” robot currently exploring Mars, has just reached its milestone 100,000th shot.

 

All these intense lasers provide very high energy but on very short pulses (measured in femtoseconds (1 femtosecond = 10-15 seconds)).

These high energy levels allow to explore new areas of fundamental science and particle acceleration[3], for medical application (such as medical imagery) or industrial use, such as the control of critical materials.

 

 

[1] 1 Petawatt = one million billion watts (1015W). This is equivalent to over 1,200 times the entire electrical generating capacity of the US.  

[2] The ChemCam laser camera allows fast analyses of rocks and soil on Mars.

[3]  This type of laser paves the way for a new generation of extremely powerful particle accelerators, which will be smaller and less costly,

 

All articles