Big Ideas Lab - Jupiter Laser Facility

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

From fusion experiments to cancer-fighting tech, the Jupiter Laser Facility is where bold ideas meet billion-watt lasers. In this episode, we go inside the lab where students and scientists alike get hands-on with some of the most powerful laser systems on Earth - turning science fiction into real-world breakthroughs, one laser shot at a time.-- Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series. Executive Produced by Levi Hanusch and Lacey Peace.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): Félicie Albert, Director, Jupiter Laser FacilityElizabeth "Liz" Grace, High Energy Density Science Center Fellow, LLNLBrought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Since their invention in 1960, lasers have been a staple of science fiction. From stormtroopers' iconic pew pew blasters to the precision laser scanners used by Starfleet for analyzing alien worlds. But beyond sci-fi, lasers are an essential part of our everyday lives in ways we often overlook. From the mundane, they can scan barcodes, to the life-changing, they can operate on eyes, to the extraordinary, they can recreate environments that you only find in stars and planets. But what's next? How will we use lasers in the next decade and beyond?

And how do we get to that next big breakthrough? It starts where all major innovations begin, by giving young scientists and great minds a place to test their ideas. A lot of laser systems, you are not able to use them or to access them the way that you're able to use and access JLF. JLF has been a beacon in science for 50 years. At the Jupiter Laser Facility, or JLF, scientists at any level, from students to seasoned veterans, can experience the magic of laser experimentation.

They're more open to trying new things at JLF than at a lot of different facilities. So it's really like a scientist's dream place. It's where breakthroughs happen, and where anyone could spark the next great discovery. JLF isn't just a place for science, it's a proving ground for the future. A place where bold questions are asked, wild ideas are tested, and the boundaries of what lasers can do are constantly being redefined. So what exactly is happening behind JLF's doors? And what does it feel like to fire a laser powerful enough

to mimic a star? Stick around, because in this episode, we're going inside. 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. You may have heard about the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, from our previous episodes. It's home to the biggest and most powerful laser in the world. But NIF only began operating in 2009.

The Jupiter Laser Facility, or JLF, is one of its predecessors. A lot of these ideas and techniques that are done at NIF have started at JLF, whether it's designing experiments that help do fusion, whether it's designing diagnostics, designing experiments that allow us to understand how matter behaves under extreme states and conditions. That's Felice Albert, the director of the Jupiter Laser Facility. We think of GLF as the great-great-grandfather of NIF. So 1974 is when the first laser was built.

It was initially a modest laser system. The first laser was called Janus, named after the Roman god with two faces, one looking to the past and the other to the future. It's a fitting name. Because this laser didn't just split its beams, it split open a new frontier in science. That is where Livermore experiments on fusion started. Housed in a room filled with gleaming optics, wires, and cooling systems, Janus might not look like a god, but it was the birthplace of Livermore's earliest fusion

experiments, pioneering efforts to recreate the extreme conditions found in stars. And incredibly, this 50-year-old laser is still in use today. It's been updated, of course, but at its core, Janus continues to do what it's always done… test bold ideas. Over the years, its success led to a growing family of lasers. After Janus, Livermore went on to bigger and bigger laser systems. With each new breakthrough, JLF attracted more scientists. It became a hub. A place where some of the world's most advanced

high-energy density experiments took shape. In 2008, we officially became a user facility that users could access at no cost. JLF became a place where researchers from across the US and the world could come test their ideas. Anyone. From a graduate student with a crazy hypothesis to a senior physicist chasing their next big result, could apply to use these multi-million dollar machines. And if accepted, they could fire the lasers themselves. Just last year in 2024, we had 65 unique users. They come from other national labs, from academia, from international institutions. We welcome everyone.

And JLF's commitment to open access science doesn't stop there. The lab has also helped launch LaserNet US, a national network of 13 high-powered laser facilities. In 2018, the US National Academy of Sciences looked at the state of laser research in the US. And in particular for a special kind of laser, which we call high intensity lasers. And they noticed that while the US was a leader in that field in the 1980s,

1990s, it was starting to lose that leadership. So one of the recommendations was the Department of Energy should create a network of high intensity laser facilities in the US to really allow the community to rally around the research of such facilities. So that's when the DOE launched LaserNet US in 2018 and the Jupiter laser facility was a founding member. Since then, we've evolved into a network of 13 high-power laser facilities and supporting capabilities. We've grown into a user base of over 400 users. We've done over 140 experiments at various facilities. And we're really located all across North America, from coast to coast, and we even have a facility in Canada.

Lasernet US is designed to give scientists unmatched access to world-class technology. It's one more way JLF helps democratize discovery. I am Elizabeth Simpson-Grace. I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the lab. Liz is one of the many scientists, or users users who utilize the lasers at JLF to conduct experiments. They're more open to trying new things at JLF than at a lot of different facilities. When a user comes, they are here for four weeks, they collect their data, they do their experiments, and then they just tear down and make room for the next group coming to the facility. We can support about 15 experiments every year. We have three different platforms.

They have different characteristics depending on what users want to do with them. These three lasers are Janus, Titan, and Comet. As we mentioned, the laser Janus is designed with two independent long-pulsed lasers. In laser terminology, a long pulse refers to a burst of light lasting nanoseconds. Still incredibly short by everyday standards, but much longer than ultra-fast lasers, which emit pulses measured in femtoseconds. These nanosecond pulses allow scientists to precisely deliver energy in quick bursts,

rather than as a continuous beam. The laser pulses themselves have a duration. It's not just a continuous stream of energy. It's like hitting a nail with a hammer, a short, large burst of power. Janus can run every 30 minutes, allowing for multiple tests per day. This makes it an ideal tool for fine-tuning experiments before testing them on a larger scale at NIF. The National Ignition Facility owes its successes to over 100 diagnostics

that allow scientists to understand the experiments. These diagnostics are like the eyes and ears of an experiment. They track what's happening inside a laser shot in real time by measuring energy, temperature, radiation, and more. It's really a pride for us to say that some of these diagnostics were developed at GLF. The second laser, Titan, can run just as many experiments per day as Janus, but it has the option to run a long or a short pulse. Titan's short pulses can reach durations as brief as 500 femtoseconds.

That's 500 quadrillions of a second. Compared to Janus, which emits pulses between 1 and 20 nanoseconds, Titan shots are over 2000 times shorter. To visualize that, 500 femtoseconds is to one hour as an hour is to the age of the universe. These short bursts allow researchers to explore extreme physics on unimaginably fast timescales, capturing moments that would otherwise be invisible. Long and short pulses deliver different heat factors. Deciding which laser pulse to use is up to each specific scientist and the needs of their experiment.

It depends on the physics that you're interested in, and if you want to study something that's super high temperature, then you want your short pulse and your high intensity. And if you want to study a lower temperature system, then you would apply the long pulse to it. Titan can do both. It's why it's the most popular and in-demand laser at JLF. It's like mini-NIF, basically. And finally, there's Comet. This laser system can run 15 shots per hour,

making it a very popular system for diagnostic testing. At COMET, you have a higher repetition rate. You can get a laser pulse every five minutes compared to NIF where you get two laser pulses a day. COMET provides two every 10 minutes. So even if you can't study it at the energies that you have at NIF, you can still gain insight into a piece of that physics. It's a veritable buffet of lasers.

We have a joke that says we're not Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with the lasers, lasers, nothing but lasers. And their applications are immense. One thing we like to do at the lab with lasers is shoot things and bring them to extreme temperatures and pressures. Laser pulses can do crazy things. Lasers are at the forefront of breakthroughs in healthcare. They're already used in countless medical therapies, including LASIK eye surgery and dental procedures.

But researchers are hoping to push those boundaries even further. There are scientists who are thinking about using them for creating sources for radiation therapy to help treat cancers. They are scientists who are looking at ways to use these lasers for techniques to really image your body with better precision. The field is working towards using proton sources generated by lasers to try to destroy tumors. The list of breakthroughs is really hard to quantify, but I'm just amazed at our users

who come with breakthroughs every time they do an experiment at the facility. That's what's so incredible about the lab. If someone has a great idea, they don't have to be far into their career to get a shot at seeing it through. They can even be a student. It's funny because for all the kids who like to just play with things and build things, building a laser is actually not that different. Felici built her first laser when she was 22,

an undergrad with a desk full of parts and no clear instructions. Just a challenge. A mirror here, a crystal there. Hours spent aligning beams and adjusting angles. And then, suddenly, light. A laser beam. That first wow moment still fuels her today. While Felice no longer runs experiments herself, she now leads the facility that makes those moments possible for others. As director of JLF, she supports and guides the next generation of scientists as they pursue discoveries of their own. We need a STEM workforce to maintain strong leadership in science and in technology.

We need to continue to train young scientists and ensure they get into the field. Liz and her work are a great example of this. It was during the second year of my PhD program that my advisor recommended that I spend a summer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the Jupiter Laser Facility. I had a really great internship there, and that was how I got into plasmaphysics.

Liz specializes in high energy density science, which is testing how different matter reacts under immense amounts of pressure. One example of that is we can use a short pulse laser system to create particle beams. What happens is the laser pushes the electrons out from the target material and then it creates a kind of slingshot where the protons shoot out and they become ballistic, meaning that they have really high energies. Depending on the laser system you can get up to 100 mega electron volt proton energies. That's enough concentrated energy to raise the temperature of water from

0 to 1 degree Celsius. Which doesn't sound like a lot, until you remember those laser beams are only active for a nanosecond or less. And that seemingly small temperature change is the difference between ice and liquid water. When you make that kind of shift in a billionth of a second, you're recreating the intense, fast physics of things like nuclear explosions or stellar formation. You can get these really powerful, high-flex and high-energy particle sources. It's a small test that Liz and the folks at Livermore are hoping to use on a much larger scale. But even before her research creating particle sources, Liz utilized the resources at JLF to develop a solution for a widespread challenge she and other scientists faced.

Capturing and interpreting all of the properties of each laser pulse within a single experiment. It's actually really hard to get a complete picture of the way that the pulses evolve in both space and time and color on a single laser pulse. Capturing all of that in real time is no small feat. A laser pulse might last just 500 femtoseconds and span only 150 microns, roughly the width of a human hair. Trying to measure everything happening in that instant is like trying to capture a lightning strike with a single camera, one frame at a time.

By the time you've caught the beginning, the rest has already vanished. If you could only use one camera, taking one photo at a time, you'd never get a cohesive, full image. It's not super plausible that the laser would be exactly the same for all that time. We worked on developing a method that can take all of this information at once, which is StripedFish, spatially and temporally resolved intensity and phase evaluation device, full information from a single hologram. StripedFish captures a complete snapshot of the laser's behavior in a single shot, including

how it shifts, stretches, and changes color across space and time. It creates what's called a temporally integrated image, combining everything that happens during the laser pulse into a single frame. This diagnostic takes all of the information at once. We actually make a digital hologram of the laser pulse. This hologram reveals how the pulse behaves across space and color, what scientists call

its spatial and spectral dependence. And with that insight, researchers can quickly catch flaws, make adjustments, and fine-tune their experiments with precision. Even more impressive than the Striped Fish program itself, Liz helped develop and improve it as a student. That work was the focus of my PhD. The thing I like the most about JLF is how hands-on it is and how even as a student I was able to get my hands dirty.

It's so unique. Not a lot of these high intensity laser systems exist. And you have all of these incredibly competent technical staff who help to provide resources and training and learn as you work. They provide so much support to users in general. And there's always somebody that you can talk to if you're having a problem with different aspects

of your experiment. Countless scientists, like both Felicia and Liz, choose to stay at the lab after their time as students. This is partly because JLF provides state-of-the-art facilities, but also due to a broader culture at the lab of perseverance and encouragement. At the lab, I found a very supportive environment. Every day is different different and I can just come do an experiment okay maybe it's not going to work but then I will try again. If something fails it's not because you are a failure it's because sometimes things don't work and just keep going. It's that attitude that makes a career at JLF so rewarding. There's never a boring moment in my job. I will interact with people doing theory,

doing technical work, building parts, machining parts. I will interact with other scientists. I will travel. I've traveled the world to see other scientists and give presentations and collaborate. I really loved being in the lab and that was what JLF uniquely provided. The data doesn't come alive in the same way as if you took the data yourself. You have a sort of connection to the place and to the laser.

Creating that yourself is a very different feeling from being handed a data set. It's the difference between watching a video of a roller coaster and being on one. There's nothing like the rush of experiencing it for yourself. And between national security, accelerating particles, understanding materials in extreme conditions, recreating the insides of stars, and potential medical

advancements, the Jupiter Laser Facility and its scientists never stop searching for the next adrenaline rush-inducing breakthrough. Maybe the next lightsaber won't be wielded by a Jedi, but by a grad student in the laser lab. Maybe the next world-changing energy breakthrough won't come from a galaxy far, far away, but from right here in Livermore. And maybe the next big idea in science fiction will be inspired by real science, fired through

a beam line, tested by someone like Felicia or Liz, and aimed straight at the future. I'm most excited to see where the science is going to take us. Really, the possibilities are endless. At JLF, the force is science. And the future? That's being built one laser shot at a time. Thanks for listening.