BELLA Laser Achives World Record

Late on the night of July 20th, the laser system of the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), delivered a petawatt of power in a pulse just 40 femtoseconds long. In that single moment, the BELLA laser system delivered a burst of power equal to twice the entire US’s total power consumption at any given instance in time -- “instance” being operative as the BELLA’s average consumption is roughly equal to what a typical household light bulb uses. The achievement marks a major milestone both in the advancement of particle accelerator technology and for the BELLA, which when completed will be the first laser plasma accelerator to produce a 10 GeV beam of electrons. For perspective, before being converted the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center achieved 50‑GeV electron beams, but required a linear accelerator two miles long to do it. By contrast, the BELLA is just one meter long, supported by its laser system in an adjacent room.