One of the first experimenters at the new flagship US laser, Michigan alum Franklin Dollar’s mission is bigger than research.
When the first beam of light ran through a laser system that will be the most powerful in the U.S., it was delivered to an experiment designed by an old hand at U-M’s Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences.
As a graduate student in the late 2000s, Franklin Dollar (MSE Electrical Engineering ’10, PhD Applied Physics ’12) built experiments at HERCULES, the most intense laser in the world at the time. HERCULES has now been upcycled into ZEUS, the Zetawatt-Equivalent Ultra-short laser pulse System—which will offer triple the power of the next largest US lasers. Its peak power is three petawatts, or more than 100 times global electricity production, but only for a few quintillionths of a second.
Dollar has stayed connected with the lab, leading experiments in late 2022, early 2023 and January this year that the ZEUS team used to work out the bugs in the system. Then earlier this month, he led ZEUS’s first official experiment in the flagship target area, where the signature zetawatt-equivalent experiments will take place.