Highest intensity laser ever Credit: Chang Hee Nam, CoReLS After a decade of work, researchers at the Center for Relativistic Laser Science (CoReLS) at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea have achieved a record-high laser pulse intensity – over 1023 Watts per centimetres squared (W/cm 2). This is equivalent to focusing all of the light reaching Earth from the Sun onto a spot just 10 microns wide – just a little bigger than the width of a human red blood cell. It beats the 1022 W/cm 2 laser demonstrated by a team at the University of Michigan in 2004. “This high-intensity laser will let us tackle new and challenging science, especially strong field quantum electrodynamics, which has been mainly dealt with by theoreticians,” says Chang Hee Nam, director of CoReLS and professor at Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology.