A new laser at Queen’s University Belfast—the TARANIS-X—will fire pulses lasting less than 10 femtoseconds, fast enough to freeze the motion of atoms and electrons in materials. This matters because most radiation damage, from medical X-rays to nuclear reactor components, unfolds at the nanoscale and in trillionths of a second. Until now, scientists could only see the before and after, not the process itself. The TARANIS-X laser, combined with laser-driven X-ray and particle sources, lets researchers watch in real time how materials respond to extreme radiation—how cracks form, how heat spreads, how bonds break. If this works, it could transform how we design materials for nuclear reactors, spacecraft electronics, and medical radiotherapy. Engineers could build components that survive radiation longer, and doctors could target tumours more precisely by understanding how healthy tissue reacts during the split-second of exposure. The project is fundamentally curiosity-driven—it aims to open a new window onto ultrafast, nanoscale physics. Past work on such lasers has already led to compact particle accelerators and novel imaging techniques. This grant ensures the UK stays at the leading edge of that field.
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The Centre for Plasma Physics is internationally leading in the exploitation of intense lasers and laser driven ultrafast radiation sources. This platform grant will allow strategic exploitation of the developments seeded in the previous, highly successful platform grant. In particular, the advent of ultrafast laser driven radiation sources ranging from x-rays to particle beams allows the dynamics of the natural world at the shortest timescales and spatially on the nanoscale to be investigated. This is the core theme of this platform grant, which follows on from the success in these areas achieved during the first platform grant. Emerging from this is the development of the worlds most powerful few-cycle (<10fs) laser - the TARANIS-X project. These high-energy, extremely short pulses are a key extension to the TARANIS facility at QUB and will enable cutting edge science. The over-arching strategic goal of this proposal is to fully exploit the new pathways that have been enabled by laser driven radiation sources and to maximize the scientific impact of the recently funded TARANIS-X project (EPSRC Experimental Equipment Call) by fully exploiting the synergies available through close integration of academic staff under the auspices of the proposed NanoRad Platform Grant.
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