Special envoy to Magurele
With his white hair neatly tucked into his cap to avoid polluting the ultra-clean atmosphere of the room, Gérard Mourou leans over a small red box about a meter long, the lid of which has been opened. He points to the delicate optical instruments installed there and explains:
“
This small laser provides a very short pulse, of a few femtoseconds
(millionths of a billionth of a second, Editor's note)
. This is the seed that we will amplify and grow throughout the system.
»
Sixty meters further, at the other end of the immense room of more than 2000 m2, the tiny initial impulse transformed into a monster: the most powerful laser beam in the world, reaching a world record of 10 petawatts (10 million billion watts).
This tour de force achieved by the French company Thalès is the realization of an idea put forward almost twenty years ago by Gérard Mourou which earned him the Nobel Prize…
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