Texas University exhibits petawatt laser facility

By focusing the 1.1 petawatt laser onto very small pellets of fusionable fuel, perhaps new nuclear fusion reaction sequences can somehow be produced that were previously unknown. Given the hundreds of isotopes that exist for elements of atomic number less than that of Iron or Nickel, the number of potential fusion sequences could be very large. Studies of the details of such can give us valuable insight and perhaps new fundamental discoveries of the workings of the strong nuclear force within the field of quantum-chromo-dynamics.

The reality that small but still macroscopic pellets of fusionable fuels can be blasted by this laser within the confines of a very controlled laboratory setting offers benefits over studying the nuclear products of thermonuclear weapons whose huge energy release vaporizes and ionizes any nearby equipment.

It could be interesting to develop some sort of laser apparatus/particle accelerator combination to study the effects of using such intense laser beam pulses on unstable fundamental particles such as muons and even tau leptons.