• Laboratories: LPP, LULI, LERMA, LESIA, IAP, LCPMR, INSP, ONERA
• Number of researchers involved: about 70
• Publications (2012-2018): more than 500

Multi-PW lasers (Apollon / CILEX in France and ELI in the Czech Republic and Romania) will allow to obtain focused intensities beyond 10²² W/cm² and therefore to observe matter under conditions never before obtained on Earth, opening new questions which require, among other things, a modeling of the fundamental processes at the origin of the creation of plasmas. In the context of free electron lasers, we will also be able to understand the dynamics of electrons and the formation of plasma at the attosecond scale, a plasma generated by high energy photons.

In addition, installations such as LMJ / PETAL pave the way for the study of ultra-intense magnetic fields of hundreds of MGs coupled to plasmas of near solid density at a temperature of several million degrees.

These facilities involve the development of new experimental diagnostics, theoretical models and numerical codes to describe and understand the new regimes that will be obtained through laser-plasma interaction. These installations will make it possible to generate pair and relativistic plasmas in the laboratory, or to study the behavior of matter subject to extremely intense electric fields in interaction with atoms, molecules or clusters.

These studies also join, the issue of matter subject to extreme pressures or in an intense radiation field, to astrophysical issues such as the interior of planets, stellar opacities or ultra-magnetized compact objects.

ILLUSTRATION: Illustration of the GENESIS project, ERC Advanced Grant obtained in 2018 by J. Fuchs at LULI, which aims to understand the behavior of matter under extreme conditions by recreating them in the laboratory with new generation ultra-intense lasers (LPP, LERMA, LULI ). © Julien Fuchs, LULI – ERC Genesis – École Polytechnique.