The free-electron laser (FEL) located at the US Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and supported by the Office of Naval Research achieved 10 kW of infrared laser light in late July, making it the most powerful tunable laser in the world. Several experiments are about to begin at the new facility, including a study of laser propagation through the atmosphere for the Naval Research Laboratory, the fabrication of carbon nanotubes by NASA scientists, and photochemistry and photobiology investigations.
The FEL programme at Jefferson Lab began as the One-Kilowatt Demonstration FEL, which broke power records and made its mark as the world’s brightest high-average-power laser. It delivered 2.1 kW of infrared light, more than twice what it was initially designed to achieve, before it was taken offline in November 2001 for an upgrade to 10 kW. During the upgrade process FEL staff installed new optics, more accelerating components, new power supplies in the injector and a new wiggler that enables the electron beam to produce laser light. These improvements increased the linear accelerator energy 300% (from 40 to 160 MeV), doubled the machine’s achievable current and made it possible for the optics to take a 10-fold increase in power.
