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The Large Hadron Collider didn't destroy Earth, so physicists are having another go. A team is planning to build an enormously powerful laser that could rip apart the fabric of space.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra High-Field laser will be 200 times more powerful than the most powerful lasers that currently exist on the planet, says John Collider, a member of the team and the director of the Central Laser Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot. "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 Telegraph.


The aim is to boil a vacuum. Vacuums are normally thought of as empty space, but physicists believe they actually contain tiny particles that pop in and out of existence, so fast that it's difficult to prove they exist. By focusing the ELI Ultra-High-Field laser on an area of space, the team believes that the fabric of the vacuum can be pulled apart, revealing these particles for the first time.

The laser will be made up of 10 beams, each providing 200 petawatts of power for less than a trillionth of a second. As 200 petawatts is more than 100,000 times the amount of power produced by the world, the energy will need to be stored up over time in huge capacitors. At the crucial moment, that energy will be released to form metre-wide laser beams that will then be combined and focused down onto a tiny point. At that point, the intensity of the light will be greater than at the centre of the Sun.

In these conditions, it's hoped that these pairs of matter-antimatter particles -- which normally annihilate each other almost as soon as they form -- will be pulled apart, leaving tiny electrical charges, which the team hope to measure. The research could yield some insight into why the Universe appears to contain far more matter than we've so far been able to detect.

The location of the laser hasn't yet been decided, but the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Central Laser Facility is in the running. Three prototypes for the laser will be constructed in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, each costing £200 million and scheduled to become operational in 2015. If successful, the final laser will be built -- costing around £1 billion -- in either Britain, Russia, France, Hungary, Romania or the Czech Republic.

Wolfgang Sandner, coordinator of the Laserlab Europe network and president of the German Physics Society, said: "There are many challenges to be over come before we can do that, but it is mainly a matter of scaling up the technology we have so we can produce the powers needed."