As tabletop lasers continue to reach record levels of peak power, the interaction of light with matter has crossed a new threshold, in which plasma electrons at the laser focus oscillate at relativistic velocities. The highest forces ever exerted by light have been used to accelerate beams of electrons and protons to energies of a million volts in distances of only microns. Not only is this acceleration gradient up to a thousand times greater than in radio-frequency-based sources, but the transverse emittance of the particle beams is comparable or lower. Additionally, laser-based accelerators have been demonstrated to work at a repetition rate of 10 Hz, an improvement of a factor of 1000 over their best performance of just a couple of years ago. Anticipated improvements in energy spread may allow these novel compact laser-based radiation sources to be useful someday for cancer radiotherapy and as injectors into conventional accelerators, which are critical tools for x-ray and nuclear physics research. They might also be used as a spark to ignite controlled thermonuclear fusion. The ultrashort pulse duration of these particle bursts and the x rays they can produce, hold great promise as well to resolve chemical, biological or physical reactions on ultrafast (femtosecond) time scales and on the spatial scale of atoms. Even laser-accelerated protons are soon expected to become relativistic. The dense electron–positron plasmas and vast array of nuclear reactions predicted to occur in this case might even help bring astrophysical phenomena down to Earth, into university laboratories. This paper reviews the many recent advances in this emerging discipline, called high-field science. © 2001 American Institute of Physics.
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