Big Ideas Lab - Advanced Lasers

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, scientists are developing high-repetition-rate lasers that fire thousands of times per second. In this episode, we’ll explore what these advanced lasers are and how they’re being used. From thermal challenges to breakthrough designs like the BAT laser, we’ll dive into what makes this new generation of lasers so powerful.--Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series. Executive Produced by Levi Hanusch.Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Daniel Brunelle. Story Editing by Daniel Brunelle. Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell. Narrated by Matthew Powell. Video Production by Levi Hanusch.Guests featured in this episode (in order of appearance): Jackson Williams, Physicist at LLNLTom Spinka, Laser Physicist at LLNLBrought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Extreme ultraviolet light. A ghostly shimmer just beyond human sight. Wavelengths so short they can sculpt matter at the scale of atoms. Not long ago it lived only in theory. Now you see the results of it every day. The efficiency of electric cars gliding quietly down the road. The speed of high-end laptops clicking away in coffee shops. shops, the power of the latest smartphones that can still slip into our pockets, each one advanced

by the chips inside, chips imaged with extreme ultraviolet light. All of those systems start with a plasma. You get the plasma very hot and it starts to emit a radiation band that is further beyond the visible light and into the extreme ultraviolet. This process called Extreme Ultraviolet lithography, or EUVL, is made possible by a laser-created plasma heated to 100,000 degrees. It revolutionized chipmaking and is just one of many advanced laser techniques Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory helped develop that not only enhance everyday life, but are also reshaping health, energy, and national defense. Medical applications, radiotherapies, x-rays, protons, or ions that are used to treat cancer. Lasers have a potential of being the best version of those devices in the world. And scientists at Lawrence Livermore are pushing that technology even further.

The lasers that we're producing now are useful in scaling to the next generation of computer chips that will extend Moore's law for another 30, 40, 50 years. What we are developing in our group is new laser technologies that actually will really impact people's everyday lives. Welcome to the frontier of light. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab, your exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary-pushing pioneers, and get unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions,

discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow today. The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Labs has made headlines as the largest and most energetic laser in the world. California scientists made a major breakthrough. History-making projects is underway right now. It's massive laser, able to recreate the temperatures and pressures close to what exists in the core of stars. But close by is a quieter revolution. Engineers and physicists at Lawrence Livermore have been working on something very different.

Lasers that fire thousands of times per second to create systems that are faster, cleaner, and more efficient than ever. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is world-renowned as one of the places to be, if not the place to be, for big lasers. Tom Spinka is a laser physicist at the lab. My group is called Advanced Photon Technologies, and we develop laser sources and applications of those lasers. For me, it's being on the cutting edge, being able to demonstrate in the laboratory, develop new materials, new concepts for how lasers work. The Advanced Photon Technologies Program, or APT, designs high-repetition-rate laser systems that deliver short, powerful pulses of light repeatedly and with incredible precision. These lasers are engineered to run fast, stay cool, and perform reliably, both in experiments

and real-world environments. APT's lasers are advancing the state-of-the-art for high-repetition-rate lasers that could be used for applications like advancing cancer treatment, supporting cutting-edge materials and aerospace research, and powering semiconductor manufacturing, such as the extreme ultraviolet lithography process. And they are opening up new application spaces. Their impact reaches far beyond the lab. One of the distinguishing characteristics that makes an advanced laser or something on the cutting edge is being able to produce those laser pulses multiple times per second as opposed to one shot every couple of hours.

But what could these advanced lasers actually do? Cancer is treated generally with x-rays. That's Jackson Williams, a physicist in the Advanced Photon Technologies Group at Lawrence Livermore. You shoot an X-ray beam into the cancer, and you try to kill as much of that tissue as possible. That's a bit of a sledgehammer when it comes to medical therapies. X-rays, while effective, tend to hit everything in their path. healthy tissue, organs, bone. But new technologies aim to change that

by swapping force for surgical precision. You can use things like protons or other heavier element ions, things like carbon atoms. And those are like scalples. Those are the ability to deposit that energy in a very small space. And so you try to only kill the tumor and nothing of the healthy cells around it. People have been doing this actually for a better part of 20, 30 years.

This kind of therapy, known as ion beam therapy, has been used clinically for decades in some parts of the world. But the potential to generate and control these beams using high-repetition rate lasers could dramatically expand access, helping bring cutting-edge treatments to more hospitals and more patients. We build lasers in a way that we are trying to solve the technical paths. Another promising area is in advanced manufacturing. High-repetition lasers are transforming how we inspect parts made through additive manufacturing,

the intricate, layered components used in aerospace, automotive, and energy industries. It's also important to be able to see inside of those parts, where are the defects? How might you need to post-process that part and how can you qualify that part if you're making a beam for a bridge? How do you know that there's not a critical defect in that part that might cause it to fail? By generating ultra-precise high-energy x-rays, advanced lasers can image dense materials from the inside out without damaging or altering them. This lets engineers catch hidden flaws early to make sure every part is solid.

There is no shortage of ways that advanced lasers could transform many fields beyond medicine and advanced manufacturing. The challenge is in building lasers that are precise and powerful at a reasonable cost. One of the key engineering challenges, particular to high repetition rate lasers is managing heat. With the laser firing so quickly there is no chance for the system to cool down. The most important aspect that needs to be thought about and engineered and taking great care for is heat. So every time that you store a little bit of energy in a laser gain material and then extract that energy, it leaves behind a little bit of energy in the laser gain material.

And that little bit of energy turns into heat. And when materials change temperature, some of their material properties also change. Some of those things impact the laser performance. Whenever a laser fires, not all the energy makes it out the front door. Some of it lingers as heat inside the system itself. And even tiny shifts in temperature can subtly warp the very material the laser relies on, changing how it behaves with each pulse. The types of lasers that we plan to build have power outputs that are equivalent to a race car

engine and the cooling is about the same. So you need to be able to extract all of that heat that's being made in the engine or the laser in this case and being able to send power to the wheels or being able to deliver the laser pulse to its target. Too much heat can blur the beam or break the system entirely. How do you extract all that heat? And one of the major contributions that Livermore has had to this field is the development of a technology called gas cooling. The principle behind gas cooling is something we all use, especially when our food or drinks are too hot. I think pretty much everybody knows that if you blow air over a surface the surface can be cooled down right i mean people are familiar with soup right you blow on

it a little bit cools down then you can eat your soup one of livermore's innovations was being able to adapt that same concept to solid laser materials and so we basically chop up the laser material into a number of different slabs and then flow gas through the gaps between those slabs and we do that at very rapid speeds, basically approaching that of how fast an airplane flies, and then you can use that very rapid exchange of gas and the gas interacting with the solid materials to extract the heat. To truly unlock the potential of high energy, high repetition rate lasers, scientists also need the right materials, ones that can be easily and cheaply energized and can handle the heat while maintaining good beam quality. But finding a laser material that can deliver in these areas,

without other serious downsides is a significant challenge. The bat laser answers that challenge. The bat laser are a big aperture thuleum, is a laser that is a new gain media that allows us to be more efficient and run at faster repetition rates. The bat laser was designed at Lawrence Livermore and represents a new generation of high repetition rate systems built to deliver precision, speed, and endurance.

So instead of the NIF, which is one every four hours, this laser system can run it 10,000 times per second. The bat laser is one of the most advanced systems to come out of the APT program and contains a new kind of medium, thulium. Thuleum is a rare earth element that is mixed or doped into a common laser crystal known as itrium lithium fluoride, or Yilf, creating a Goldilocks material for the Bat Laser. Its material properties, like strength and thermal conductivity, are very good.

Not outstanding, but its energy storage lifetime is exceptional. Most importantly, Thuleum-doped Yilf doesn't have a significant weakness as it's used in the bat laser. There is no other known material with this combination. Beyond the technical advantages, there's beauty. A lot of laser crystals are really beautiful. Physically, if you pick them up and hold them, they're just stunningly perfect pieces of material. Actually, kind of like people use in jewelry.

And actually, many of the same crystals that are used in jewelry are good hosts for the atoms that you can use to store energy and then extract energy in lasers. Innovation can come with remarkable surprises. And today, advanced lasers are powerful, complex research platforms operated by expert teams and, controlled environments, eventually coming into mainstream use. The challenge ahead is transitioning these systems from the lab to the real world. Right now, they are very much scientific research tools. These are lasers that only really work in the hands of experts and usually a team of experts. And so one of the places that Lawrence Livermore really shines is being able to take

a idea on paper and develop it to the place where we know it will work and have a pathway towards a full system engineer. And then we are the partners to industry to be able to say, here's how we did it, here's the pathways we think that can be economically feasible going forward. And then it's a technology transfer out into industry for them to be able to offer that as a product. So what does the near future look like for advanced lasers? Laser technology and laser technology development is absolutely directly applicable to inertial

fusion energy and being able to use the same power source that powers the sun here on Earth. So lasers and laser technology developments are going to be needed. Similar to the experiments at the National Ignition Facility that create energy gains, inertial fusion energy uses lasers to generate the extreme heat and pressure required for fusion. Translating that approach to a fusion power plant presents many challenges, including the use of extremely robust and reliable lasers. But the work being done through APT research is laying the groundwork for that essential laser science of the future. From powering future energy systems like fusion to exploring unimagined ideas,

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is where scientific creativity meets world-changing potential. The best part about working at the lab is being able to test wild ideas and being able to go out and have a nugget of an idea and to develop that into a place where it's a hypothesis and then you test that hypothesis and have a finding, whether it works or it doesn't work. At least you know that there's an answer there. Advanced lasers are being built, tested, and refined every day. The work is complex, but the direction is clear. More precision, more power, and more potential to be able to.

to impact the world. Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating and review. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app. keep up with our latest episode. Thanks for listening.