ANN ARBOR, Mich.---If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory. “That’s the instantaneous intensity we can produce,” said Karl Krushelnick, a physics and engineering professor. “I don’t know of another place in the universe that would have this intensity of light. We believe this is a record.” The pulsed laser beam lasts just 30 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second.Such intense beams could help scientists develop better proton and electron beams for radiation treatment of cancer, among other applications.
