XCELS – Exawatt Center for Extreme Light Studies

XCELS – Exawatt Center for Extreme Light Studies

• Period of project implementation: 2012-2026
• Cost and funding of the project: IAP RAS has invested 1.2 billion RUB (roughly 15.7 million EUR) in the XCELS project, approximately 32 billion RUB (roughly 418 million EUR) is expected to be obtained from the Russian government
• High-power laser with unprecedented giant peak power of about 200 Petawatt, with a prospect to increase it up to 1 Exawatt and beyond
• Research: exploring the states of matter in electrodynamic fields, probing QED vacuum structure in extremely strong electromagnetic fields; developing compact particle and radiation sources with unprecedented parameters
• The design of the building of the XCELS facility is being developed

CREMLINplus related objectives of the XCELS high-power laser

• Design a prototype of a relativistic plasma mirror for XCELS and develop a prototype of nonlinear compressor of ultra-intense laser pulses for XCELS
• Successful experiments on nonlinear pulse compression down to 10 fs have been recently performed (see "Use of KDP crystal as a Kerr nonlinear medium for compressing PW laser pulses down to 10 fs" in High Power Laser Science and Engineering (2021), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/hpl.2021.40)
• Develop technologies for ultrashort laser pulse contrast enhancement based on non-linear optical devices as well as related single-shot spatio-temporal diagnostics for ultrashort / ultra- intense laser pulses for XCELS
• Train experts in Europe and Russia for high-power laser technologies.