Advanced Lasers
9/23/202515 min
At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, scientists are developing high-repetition-rate lasers that fire thousands of times per second. In this episode, we’ll explore what these advanced lasers are and how they’re being used. From thermal challenges to breakthrough designs like the BAT laser, we’ll dive into what makes this new generation of lasers so powerful.
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Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series.
Executive Produced by Levi Hanusch.
Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Daniel Brunelle.
Story Editing by Daniel Brunelle.
Audio Engineeri...
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 0· Host0:02
Extreme ultraviolet light, a ghostly shimmer just beyond human sight. Wavelengths so short they can sculpt matter at the scale of atoms. Not long ago, it lived only in theory. Now, you see the results of it every day. The efficiency of electric cars gliding quietly down the road. The speed of high-end laptops clicking away in coffee shops. The power of the latest smartphones that can still slip into our pockets. Each one advanced by the chips inside, chips imaged with extreme ultraviolet light.
Jackson Williams· Guest0:42
All of those systems start with a plasma. You get the plasma very hot, and it starts to emit a radiation band that is further beyond the visible light and into the extreme ultraviolet.
Speaker 0· Host0:54
This process, called extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUVL, is made possible by a laser-created plasma heated to 100,000 degrees. It revolutionized chip-making, and is just one of many advanced laser techniques Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory helped develop that not only enhance everyday life, but are also reshaping health, energy, and national defense.
Jackson Williams· Guest1:22
Medical applications, radiotherapies, X-rays, protons or ions that are used to treat cancer. Lasers have