Scientists plan $1.5bn laser strong enough 'to tear the fabric of space'

A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain.

The major scientific project will follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider and will answer questions about the universe.

The laser will be capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it will be similar to the light the earth receives from the sun but focused on a speck smaller than a pin prick.

Extreme: A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain

Scientists say it will be so powerful they will be able to boil the very fabric of space and create a vacuum.

A vacuum fizzles with mysterious particles that come in and out of existence but the phenomenon happens so fast that no-one has ever actually been able to prove it.

It is hoped the Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility would allow scientists to prove the particles are real by pulling the vacuum fabric apart.

Scientists even believe it might help them to prove whether other dimensions actually exist.

This latest experiment will follow the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider and be the next big scientific experiment

Professor John Collier, a scientific leader for the ELI project and director of the Central Laser Facility at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, Oxfordshire, said the laser would be the most powerful on earth.

'At this kind of intensity we start to get into unexplored territory as it is an area of physics that we have never been before,' he told the Sunday Telegraph.

The ELI ultra-high field laser, which will be completed by the end of the decade, will cost £1bn and the UK is among a number of European countries in the running to house it.

The European Commission has already authorised plans for three more lasers which will become prototypes for the ultra-high field laser.

Scientists hope the laser will also allow them to see how particles inside an atom behave and it is hoped it might be able to explain the mystery of why the universe contains more matter than previously detected by revealing what dark matter really is.



HOW IT WILL WORK

The ultra-high field laswer will be made up of 10 beams - each more powerful than the prototype lasers. It will produce 200 petawatts of power - more than 100,000 times the power of the world's combined electricity production but in less than a trillionth a second. The energy needed to power the laser will be stored up beforehand and then used to produce a beams several feet wide which will then be combined and eventually focused down onto a tiny spot. The intensity of the beam is so powerful and will produce such extreme conditions, that do not even exist in the centre of the sun.







Powerful: The ultra-high field laser will be made up of 10 beams - each more powerful than the prototypes



