In the 2015 review paper ‘Petawatt Class Lasers Worldwide’ a comprehensive overview of the current status of high-power facilities of ${>}200~\text{TW}$ was presented. This was largely based on facility specifications, with some description of their uses, for instance in fundamental ultra-high-intensity interactions, secondary source generation, and inertial confinement fusion (ICF). With the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Professors Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou for the development of the technique of chirped pulse amplification (CPA), which made these lasers possible, we celebrate by providing a comprehensive update of the current status of ultra-high-power lasers and demonstrate how the technology has developed. We are now in the era of multi-petawatt facilities coming online, with 100 PW lasers being proposed and even under construction. In addition to this there is a pull towards development of industrial and multi-disciplinary applications, which demands much higher repetition rates, delivering high-average powers with higher efficiencies and the use of alternative wavelengths: mid-IR facilities. So apart from a comprehensive update of the current global status, we want to look at what technologies are to be deployed to get to these new regimes, and some of the critical issues facing their development.

The standard model of particle physics currently provides our best description of fundamental particles and their interactions. The theory predicts that the different charged leptons, the electron, muon and tau, have identical electroweak interaction strengths. Previous measurements have shown that a wide range of particle decays are consistent with this principle of lepton universality. This article presents evidence for the breaking of lepton universality in beauty-quark decays, with a significance of 3.1 standard deviations, based on proton–proton collision data collected with the LHCb detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The measurements are of processes in which a beauty meson transforms into a strange meson with the emission of either an electron and a positron, or a muon and an antimuon. If confirmed by future measurements, this violation of lepton universality would imply physics beyond the standard model, such as a new fundamental interaction between quarks and leptons.

The development of highly active and durable inexpensive electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is still a formidable challenge. Herein, an ordered hexagonal-closed-packed (hcp)-Ru nanocrystal coated with a thin layer of N-doped carbon (hcp-Ru@NC) was fabricated through the thermal annealing of polydopamine (PDA)-coated Ru nanoparticle (RuNP@PDA). As an alternative to Pt/C catalyst, the hcp-Ru@NC nanocatalyst exhibited the small overpotential of 27.5 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm −2 , as well as long-term stability for HER in acid media. Interestingly, the HER performance of hcp-Ru is highly dependent on its crystallinity. The calculation from density functional theory (DFT) revealed that the difference in HER activity over various exposed surface causes the crystallinity-dependent property of hcp-Ru. The results provided clues to guide the design of Ru-based inexpensive HER electrocatalyst.

Magnetic reconnection is a process by which oppositely directed magnetic field lines passing through a plasma undergo dramatic rearrangement, converting magnetic potential into kinetic energy and heat 1,2. It is believed to play an important role in many plasma phenomena including solar flares 3,4 , star formation 5 and other astrophysical events 6 , laser-driven plasma jets 7-9 , and fusion plasma instabilities 10. Because of the large differences of scale between laboratory and astrophysical plasmas, it is often difficult to extrapolate the reconnection phenomena studied in one environment to those observed in the other. In some cases, however, scaling laws 11 do permit reliable connections to made, such as the experimental simulation of interactions between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere 12. Here we report well-scaled laboratory experiments that reproduce loop-top-like X-ray source emission by reconnection outflows interacting with a solid target. Our experiments exploit the mega-gauss-scale magnetic field generated by interaction of a high-intensity laser with a plasma to reconstruct a magnetic reconnection topology similar to that which occurs in solar flares. We also identify the separatrix and diffusion regions associated with reconnection in which ions become decoupled from electrons on a scale of the ion inertial length. A major objective of laboratory astrophysics is to simulate the fundamental nature of astrophysical plasma physics processes in a laboratory environment so that certain astrophysical phenomenon can be studied in a controlled manner 13. High energy density facilities, such as high-powered lasers and Z-pinches, can provide such opportunities 14 , for example, direct measurements of opacity 15 , equations of state 16 , and photoionized plasmas 17,18 , as well as the similarity of physics, such as certain hydrodynamic phenomena of jets 19 and shocks 20 where a scaling law between astrophysical and laboratory plasma systems can be applied. As a fundamental cause of many plasma energy conversion processes, magnetic reconnection (MR) is certainly a high priority of such studies. Masuda et al. 21 observed the loop-top X-ray source in solar flares using the YOHKOH satellite and proposed that two antiparallel magnetic fields were merged above an arcade of closed loops as outflow jets from the reconnection point collided with high-density plasmas on the loop to produce a hot X-ray region. Ultraviolet 22 and X-ray 23,24 observations of plasma