Big Ideas Lab podcast delves into advanced lasers

It’s been laughingly said that “LLNL” stands for “lasers, lasers and nothing but lasers.” For physicists Tom Spinka and Jackson Williams, it can certainly feel that way.

“Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is world-renowned as one of the places to be, if not the place to be, for lasers,” Spinka said.

LLNL’s best-known laser system is the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world’s most energetic laser and the only place where controlled fusion ignition experiments have occurred. But with more than 60 years in the laser business, the Lab is home to many more trailblazing lasers.

The latest episode of the Big Ideas Lab podcast explores these advanced lasers — the challenges and their potential — through the voices of Spinka and Williams. Listen on Apple and Spotify.  

Spinka and Williams work in LLNL’s Advanced Photon Technologies (APT) group, which designs high-repetition-rate laser systems that deliver short, powerful pulses of light, repeatedly and with incredible precision. This is a different laser system than NIF, which operates at a low-repetition rate, capable of firing only once every few hours.

High-repetition-rate lasers are not new. They’re used in cancer treatment for ion beam therapy and in advanced manufacturing to test for material defects. And advanced lasers enabled extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL), the manufacturing process that revolutionized computer chip fabrication. But challenges like overheating and reliability are limiting their potential.

“The types of lasers that we plan to build have power outputs that are equivalent to a race car engine, and the cooling is about the same,” Williams said. “You need to be able to extract all of that heat that’s being made in the engine, or the laser, in this case.”

Too much heat can blur the beam or break the system entirely. Spinka, Williams and their colleagues in APT are tackling these issues with novel designs and new materials, like the Big Aperture Thulium, or BAT, laser.

The LLNL lasers aren’t just solving existing problems, they are advancing the state of the art. The combination of decades of laser expertise, scientific creativity and ingenuity — what’s been called the “secret sauce” of LLNL — is bringing these ideas into reality. Listen on Apple or Spotify.