“We have worked out the technology, the physics and the physical model, and launched the first phase of the physical foundations related to engineering systems. I think that in the next four-five years this installation will be operating to full capacity and will produce results,” Dr. Valentin Kostyukov said in an interview with Russian television on Monday.
Conceived in the late 1980s after the construction of the groundbreaking 12-channel Iskra-5 laser, the UFL-2M was developed for the sake of large-scale experiments on controlled thermonuclear fusion using inertial plasma confinement. Its first module become operational in 2020, and useful research began in 2021 and 2022.
Once fully operational, the UFL-2M will have a power capacity of a whopping 4.6 megajoules (MJ). For comparison, the powerful US Lawrence Livermore Labs’ National Ignition Facility’s laser, which set a world record for laser energy yield last October, achieved a power of 2.2 MJ, resulting in a useful yield of 3.4 MJ of fusion energy. France is the only other country with a similarly powerful laser, with its Laser Mégajoule facility outside Bordeaux featuring a power generation capacity of up to 2 MJ.
Interaction chamber of the UFL-2M Tsar laser installation in Sarov.
© Photo : All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics
Along with the exciting prospect of achieving controlled thermonuclear fusion for clean energy – a dream of scientists worldwide for many decades, the 'Tsar Laser' has a variety of other potential uses, including the modeling of processes occurring at the moment of a nuclear explosion, making it invaluable for research into new thermonuclear weapons.
Artist's rendering of the UFL-2M Tsar Laser installation in Sarov.
© Photo : tadviser.ru
The laser installation can also assist in groundbreaking research in the field of high energy density physics, namely, the study the properties of matter in extreme states, including ultra-high pressures and temperatures, characteristic in powerful explosions, which can be helpful, for example, in the study of processes occurring in our Sun and other stars. In some sense, the 'Tsar Laser' itself is a miniature sun created in a laboratory environment.
Russia has a well-established record as a pioneer and leader in the field of laser technologies, with Soviet scientists Valentin Fabrikant, Alexander Prokhorov, Nikolai Basov and Zhores Alferov thinking up, developing and building the first laser technologies in the world in the 1950s and early 1960s.