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Physics Nobel Prize winner Mourou to join experiments with Russian XCELS laser

According to the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the concept of the future installation is based precisely on the idea put forward by Mourou and Nizhny Novgorod physicists

NIZHNY NOVGOROD. October 9. /TASS/. 2018 Physics Nobel Prize Winner Gerard Mourou is involved in developing experiments for the XCELS laser that will be built near Nizhny Novgorod and is set to become the world’s most powerful laser center, President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeyev said on Tuesday.

"Gerard Mourou is participating in this project. One thing is to build an installation and another thing is to determine which experiments should be carried out on it with the help of this laser. A laser is the infrastructure, the installation, with the help of which scientists will be dealing with science and what kind of science it is and which inventions and applications should be expected there - this is what we are now thinking and working on, including together with Gerard Mourou," Sergeyev said during his visit to the Applied Physics Institute, which he headed in 2015-2017.

The 2018 Physics Nobel Prize award given to Mourou who worked at the Applied Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences "will considerably help promote this project," Sergeyev said earlier.

According to the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the concept of the future installation is based precisely on the idea put forward by Mourou and Nizhny Novgorod physicists.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 was awarded "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics," the organization’s website said. One half of the prize was awarded to Arthur Ashkin "for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems" and the other half jointly to Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland "for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses."

Mourou was awarded the Nobel Prize for the invention based on his joint work with scientists of the Applied Physics Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The XCELS (Exawatt Center for Extreme Light Studies) laser facility is one of six megascience projects that will appear in Russia. It will have a radiation peak power of 0.2 EW (200 PW). This radiation level will be the most powerful in the world. About 7-8 years may take for the facility’s construction. So far, only two out of six approved projects are being implemented in Russia: the PIK reactor in Gatchina and the NICA accelerator in Dubna.