International Exawatt Center for Extreme Light Field Studies (XCELS)

We describe the XCELS (eXawatt Center for Extreme Light Studies) project, whose purpose is to create a large scientific infrastructure based on laser radiation sources with a giant peak power. The heart of the project is the significant progress achieved in the last decade in the development of femtosecond multipetawatt lasers with an intensity of up to 10²³ W·cm^–2. The planned infrastructure will rely on a unique light source with a power of 600 PW based on optical parametric amplification of chirped pulses in a DKDP crystal. Fundamental processes of the radiation–matter interaction is a completely new field of knowledge and will be the main research task of the infrastructure. For the first time, opportunities will open up for studying the space–time structure of vacuum and unknown phenomena at the intersection of high-energy physics and the physics of ultraintense light fields. Expected applications of the research results will include, among other things, the development of compact particle accelerators with dimensions hundreds of times smaller than existing accelerators, the creation of sources of ultrashort pulses of hard X-ray and gamma radiation for diagnosing materials with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, the development of new sources of radiation and particles for clinical applications, etc.