The next frontier.
High-intensity lasers are opening up a new realm of light-matter interactions. In his Perspective, Yamanouchi reviews recent progress in this field, focusing on two intensity regimes: the Coulombic regime, which mostly deforms molecular structures and causes tunneling ionization, and the relativistic regime, where high-intensity lasers produce x-rays and high-energy particles and may cause nuclear fusion reactions. Efforts are under way to increase laser intensity further for accessing the next frontier.
Yamanouchi
Kaoru
K
Department of Chemistry, School of Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan. kaoru@chem.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp