A powerful new laser facility at Colorado State University is being built on the strength of public-private partnerships

With an eye on the promise of laser-fusion energy, Colorado State University (CSU)—in collaboration with Marvel Fusion, the Department of Energy (DOE), and the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)—began construction this fall on one of the highest peak-power laser facilities in the world. Set to come online in mid-2026, the facility will be the combined result of years of laser development on CSU’s Fort Collins campus and a strategic $150 million partnership with Marvel Fusion launched in 2023.

When it’s finished, the new facility will feature upgrades to an existing Ti:Sapphire laser installation capable of peak powers of 4 petawatts at an unprecedented repetition rate of 10 flashes per second, coupled with two efficient direct-diode pumped Nd:Glass lasers provided by Marvel Fusion, which will be capable of greater than 100 joules in less than 100 fs, also operating at 1 Hz. It will be a unique cluster of high-intensity, high-repetition-rate lasers that can be fired simultaneously at a single interaction point. That burst will deliver nearly 7 PW of power—more than 5,000 times the electrical generation capacity of the US—onto a focal spot roughly the width of a human hair, for approximately 100 quadrillionths of a second.

The facility’s primary mission will be to study ultrahigh energy density plasmas to support the development of fusion as a clean energy source. High intensity lasers present a way of focusing energy (in the form of photons) in both space and time and depositing it onto a small area that is typically tens of microns in size. This results in energy densities of billions of joules per cubic centimeter, similar to the center of the Sun. Marvel Fusion is particularly interested in this process as a step towards developing a commercial fusion power plant, and the company will work with CSU researchers to prototype needed lasers and gather data on matter interaction experiments. The company chose to develop this new facility in Colorado because of existing partnerships with CSU faculty and the university’s entrepreneurial spirit.

In addition to the partnership with Marvel, in 2023, DOE awarded CSU $12.5 million through its LaserNetUS program and $16 million through an inertial fusion science and technology hub known as RISE. The DOE money is being used to support continued operation of existing laser facilities on campus and later it will be used to help integrate them into the new facility’s research portfolio. The funding also allows outside researchers to use the facility for free whether they are working on fusion or any other topic, thus supporting research across many fields. Additional funds were also provided by AFOSR to build target areas that will support multi-laser interactions with solid, liquid, and gas targets.

The new facility will boast a nanofabrication lab designed to support target fabrication through a state-of-the-art nanoscale 3D printer built by Nanoscribe, as well as cleanroom space that will house ion beam deposition systems for growing high-damage-threshold optical coatings. Additional clean-room lab space is designated for future laser development, optical metrology, and final assembly for optics to be installed in the laser bay.

Colorado State University Professor Jorge Roca with the target chamber for ultrahigh intensity laser experiments. Photo credit: Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering.

Taken together, the capabilities that will be activated in the new facility represent a combination of public and private investments to spur academic research into one of the most promising, yet challenging, paths towards unlimited clean energy for all. These capabilities also address an opportunity identified by a National Academy of Sciences report in 2018 for the US to regain dominance in high-peak-power laser research, a position it held since the invention of the laser in 1960 until the early 2000s.

CSU has been a leader in high-powered laser research for years thanks to work by University Distinguished Professors Jorge Rocca and Carmen Menoni with the Advanced Laser for Extreme Photonics (ALEPH) Ti:Sapphire installation on campus. Built almost entirely in-house, the ALEPH laser system has hosted researchers from all over the world for decades as they conduct complicated laser matter experiments beyond just the field of fusion energy.

Past work with ALEPH has already demonstrated the powerful potential for collaboration that the new facility will support. For example, we are working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Maryland, and the Czech Republic’s Extreme Light Infrastructure Beamlines to advance laser wakefield acceleration of electrons. These electrons ‘surf’ a plasma wave, driven by an intense laser pulse, that has an electric field on the order of trillions of volts per meter. The initial experiments, conducted at ALEPH, were designed by PhD students at the University of Maryland and resulted in the acceleration of bunches of highly collimated electrons to multi-GeV energies in a 20 cm plasma waveguide. These initial experiments have greatly influenced the field of laser wakefield acceleration research.

Another significant ongoing collaboration with researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory has optimized the generation of laser-driven mega-electron volt X-rays used for radiographic inspection of dense objects. Compared to traditional X-ray sources, this approach results in higher resolution radiographs and can be leveraged for nondestructive evaluation of complex, mission-critical parts for aerospace and other applications. Both of these collaborations started as LaserNetUS experiments. To date, our facility has been involved in more than 30 LaserNetUS experiments which have resulted in multiple publications in leading journals.

The nexus of public and private funding at CSU will continue to support a fertile ground for academic, industry, and government researchers to collaborate using sophisticated and powerful tools. That work is not limited to fusion energy but will touch on other exciting applications in medicine and materials science as well. But perhaps most importantly, the new facility provides students at the university with an opportunity to work with state-of-the-art technology that could one day help address difficult problems like climate change. As a land-grant institution, giving students that kind of exposure on their way to becoming leaders in the field is a key goal in research and everything that we do as a university.

Reed Hollinger is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering at Colorado State University.