http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... space.html
A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain as part major new scientific project that aims to answer some of the most fundamental questions about our universe.
Due to follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider, the latest "big science" experiment being proposed by physicists will see the world's most powerful laser being constructed.
Capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it would be equivalent to the power received by the Earth from the sun focused onto a speck smaller than a tip of a pin, scientists claim it could allow them boil the very fabric of space – the vacuum.
Contrary to popular belief, a vacuum is not devoid of material but in fact fizzles with tiny mysterious particles that pop in and out of existence, but at speeds so fast that no one has been able to prove they exist.
The Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility would produce a laser so intense that scientists say it would allow them to reveal these particles for the first time by pulling this vacuum "fabric" apart.
They also believe it could even allow them to prove whether extra-dimensions exist. .....
The Ultra-High Field laser will be made up of 10 beams, each twice as powerful as the prototype lasers, allowing it to produce 200 petawatts of power – more than 100,000 times the power of the world's combined electricity production – for less than a trillionth of a second.
The huge amounts of energy needed to produce a laser beam of this strength is stored up over time before it is fired to produce large laser beams several feet wide that are then combined and focused down onto a tiny spot, much like sunlight through a magnifying glass.
At the focal point, the intensity of the light will produce conditions that are so extreme they do not exist even in the centre of our sun.
It will cause the mysterious particles of matter and antimatter thought to make up a vacuum to be pulled apart, allowing scientists to detect the tiny electrical charges they produce.
These "ghost particles", as they are known, normally annihilate one another as soon as they appear, but by using the laser to pull them apart, physicists believe they will be able to detect them.
It could help to explain the mystery of why the universe contains far more matter than we have been able to detect by revealing what so called dark matter really is.