Walk across the open yard at the University of Texas at Austin and you'll see a 17-story tower and an L-shaped building. But what lies beneath, behind heavy double doors with an obscurely stamped logo, is one of America's mightiest lasers, the Texas Petawatt (TPW).
From 2020 to 2024, I was the lead laser scientist on this powerful apparatus. TPW, now mothballed due to budget cuts, was a government-funded research center for scientists from across the country.
Sitting at the heart of LaserNetUS, a Department of Energy network, it took minuscule pulses and stretched them out before amplifying them exponentially - packing more power than the US electrical grid into a brief flash. These flashes could compress pulses to a trillionth of a second, creating stars in vacuum chambers.
A typical shot day involved targets as thin as human hair: metal foils, jets of gas or tiny plastic pellets, each designed to answer different scientific questions from stellar physics to fusion energy and cancer treatments. But the excitement was brief - hours of quiet work followed by 10 seconds where everyone held their breath.
