For the first time ever, an international team of scientists, including LLE Division Director for Plasma and Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering Dustin Froula, staff scientist Daniel Haberberger, and other researchers at LLE, has developed a way to generate high-density relativistic electron–positron pair-plasma beams in a laboratory setting. The generation of plasma “fireballs,” which are ubiquitously found in extreme astrophysical environments like black holes and neutron stars, “is a research goal at the forefront of high-energy-density science,” says lead author Charles Arrowsmith, a physicist from the University of Oxford who is joining LLE in the fall. “This [achievement] opens up an entirely new frontier in laboratory astrophysics by making it possible to experimentally probe the microphysics of gamma-ray bursts or blazar jets,” Arrowsmith says.
To read the press release in full, please visit the University of Rochester NewsCenter.