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The Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt of laser power on Monday morning, March 31, making it the highest powered laser in the world, Todd Ditmire, a physicist at The University of Texas at Austin, said.
<p>Researchers have demonstrated a compact particle accelerator less than 20 meters long that produces an electron beam with an energy of 10 billion electron volts (10 GeV). There are only two other accelerators currently operating in the U.S. that can reach such high electron energies, but both are approximately 3 kilometers long. This type of accelerator is called a wakefield laser accelerator.</p>
The sun generates heat and light by jamming or fusing hydrogen atoms together into helium.
Companies are looking to commercialize advances made by federally supported research labs in the quest for boundless energy.
Eight companies developing approaches to fusion energy will receive funding from the Energy Act of 2020, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced