The 'mirrors' exist for only a fragment of time but could help to reduce the size of ultra-high power lasers, which currently occupy buildings the size of aircraft hangars, to university basement sizes.
They have potential to be developed into a variety of plasma-based, high damage-threshold optical elements that could lead to small footprint, ultra-high-power, ultra-short pulse laser systems.
The new way of producing mirrors, and other optical components, points the way to developing the next generation high power lasers, from hundreds of petawatts (1015 watts) to exawatts (1018 watts).
The new research has been published in Communications Physics.
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