Abstract:
The National Science Foundation has funded the building and operation of the 3 Petawatt Zettawatt Equivalent Ultrashort pulse laser System (ZEUS) at the University of Michigan. It is due to be fully commissioned in late 2023. I will introduce the facility and describe the kinds of experiments and science that can be studied using ZEUS. Particularly, how ZEUS can contribute to understanding the extreme plasma regime, where strong fields mean quantum electrodynamic (QED) effects influence the complex plasma dynamics. Extreme plasmas occur in the vicinity of the universe’s most energetic objects such as magnetars and gamma ray bursts. Then I will present some of my own research group’s work on generating extremely strong magnetic fields and how we might measure them in the future.