Speaker
Description
The Multi-Petawatt Physics Prioritization (MP3) Workshop [1] was a community-initiated workshop held at Sorbonne Université, Paris, France in April 2022. The MP3 workshop goal was to develop science questions that will guide research and future experiments using the new generation of multi-petawatt power laser systems. Multi-petawatt laser-plasma interactions enable unique high-energy particle and radiation sources that will facilitate new ways to address the range of science questions. The workshop identified three themes for the science questions, 1) Highest-energy phenomena in the universe, 2) The origin and nature of space-time and matter in the universe, and 3) Nuclear astrophysics and the age/course of the universe.
This talk will give an overview of the MP3 workshop report [1], and then particularly discuss the third science theme that considers how intense laser pulses, and the generated intense beams of energetic protons, neutrons and/or photons, can induce nuclear reactions, probe nuclear physics, and enable practical applications. The MP3 report examines two nuclear themed science questions:
• What can be learned about heavy-element formation using laser-driven nucleosynthesis in plasma conditions far-from-equilibrium?
• How can high-flux gamma sources generated from multi-PW lasers be used to explore hadronic physics (low-energy QCD)?
Laser-plasma enabled nuclear physics experiments may open new opportunities for the Nuclear Photonics community.
This study is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Number 2112770.
[1] A. Di Piazza, L. Willingale, J. D. Zuegel, “Multi-Petawatt Physics Prioritization (MP3)
Workshop report,” arXiv:2211.13187 (2022).
