NSF funds Ohio State to measure world’s most powerful lasers

A $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation will fund a multi-university effort to build tools for measuring the world’s most powerful lasers, with the collaboration led by University of Nevada, Reno physicist Thomas White. These lasers compress light into a spot just a few millionths of a meter wide, recreating conditions within stars and giant planets for a fraction of a trillionth of a second. Douglass Schumacher, a professor in the Department of Physics involved in the project, says, “The 2018 and 2023 Nobel Prizes in Physics both recognized the importance of high-power lasers for science and society.” He adds that as these lasers become more powerful, new techniques are required to characterize them, and this project, DELIGHT, is dedicated to developing them. $4.5 Million NSF Grant Funds Extreme-Light Diagnostics A $4.5 million NSF grant funds a multi-university collaboration, with Douglass Schumacher, a professor, collaborating on the project formally titled Diagnostics for Extreme-LIGHT, or DELIGHT. Beyond characterizing the lasers themselves, the tools will generate X-ray and particle probes to study high-energy and high-density matter. Pierre Agostini, the 2023 Nobel Laureate and Ohio State Emeritus Professor of Physics, emphasized the scale of the challenge, stating, “40 years ago, Gerard Mourou was seeing the petawatt at the horizon. The reality of today is well beyond this vision, but such incredible powers demand a whole new collection of diagnostics to make quantitative physics, the only good physics.” The core diagnostic tools are expected to be completed within three years. The 2018 and 2023 Nobel Prizes in Physics both recognized the importance of high-power lasers for science and society. Douglass Schumacher, Professor at the Department of Physics Source: https://physics.osu.edu/news/schumacher-receives-nsf-funding-measure-worlds-most-powerful-lasers Stay currentSee today’s quantum computing news on Quantum Zeitgeist for the latest breakthroughs in qubits, hardware, algorithms, and industry deals. Tags: Ivy Delaney Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing.

For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release. Latest Posts by Ivy Delaney: Quantum algorithm solves matrix equations much faster than classical methods August 21, 2026 Quantum X Labs decoder beats benchmarks on Google’s dataset August 21, 2026 QOBLIB gains quantum optimization data from JIJ August 21, 2026