Objective
Plasma is an extreme form of matter at the heart of important applications like fusion and particle acceleration. The creation and control of plasma require high-power lasers, now increasingly within reach, often operating at terawatt or petawatt levels. One of the six grand challenges in Plasma Science and Engineering is mastering the art of molding plasmas with lasers, yet a gap exists: the need for advanced beam control at high power levels.
metaPOWER aims to fill this gap by developing high-damage-threshold metasurfaces—the state-of-the-art nanotechnology in structured light—for high-power lasers. These metasurfaces will be integrated in innovative laser beam shapers, offering spatiotemporal and vectorial (polarization) control over laser beams, thus making a leap over the state of the art, which is currently limited by the lack of advanced high-power optics.
The project will demonstrate the ability to seed and control laser-plasma instabilities via reconfigurable vector beams, and to create topology-controlled wakefield acceleration and tunable X-ray and THz-to-xUV sources based on space-time beams with orbiting pulses. This marks a paradigm shift in laser-matter interactions, enabling new possibilities in fusion energy, particle acceleration, and radiation sources. Feasibility is backed by solid preliminary results, including successful structured laser-plasma simulations, a demonstrated scheme for the synthesis of space-time beams, and initial metasurface fabrication resilient to high-power lasers.
The implications of metaPOWER's success extend far beyond the groundbreaking objectives of this proposal. These transformative technologies may catalyze advancements in quantum plasmas, laser material processing, high harmonic generation, and the development of a new class of polarization plasma optics, opening up new horizons in high-power structured laser-matter interactions.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
1000 029 Lisboa
Portugal