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The most powerful laser in the US recently produced 2 quadrillion watts of power
(news.engin.umich.edu)
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Technology
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The laws of physics are best understood at standard temperatures and pressures, where we have loads of data. To understand how physics works in more extreme circumstances, we have to create those circumstances and then measure what happens. At CERN, they accelerate particles very fast, smash them together, and record and analyze what happened. This is how they observed the Higgs boson and measured its properties.
From the article, it looks like one of the experiments is to shoot the laser into an oncoming high speed beam of electrons. One of the things they're looking for is if this high amount of energy causes matter and anti matter pairs to spontaneously form and annihilate. Our theories predict this but the more ways we can measure it the more we can learn, for instance about what happened right after the big bang, and why we were left with matter instead of everything annihilating symmetrically.