Station of Extreme Light

The Station of Extreme Light (SEL, 极端光物理线站) is laser facility aimed at producing a laser with 100 petawatts (PW) of peak power. The station is currently under construction in Shanghai, China. The laser may be powerful enough to produce matter and antimatter directly from a vacuum (the Schwinger effect).

Upon completion, the laser will be the most powerful on Earth, with an instantaneous power 10,000 times the power of all the world's electrical grids combined, and a trillion trillion times more intense than sunlight, albeit only for a tiny fraction of a second. The facility is scheduled for completion in 2023 and will be able to provide focused intensity of more than $W/cm2$.