Guiding of relativistically intense laser pulses with peak power of 0.85 PW over 15 diffraction lengths was demonstrated by increasing the focusing strength of a capillary discharge waveguide using laser inverse Bremsstrahlung heating. This allowed for the production of electron beams with quasi-monoenergetic peaks up to 7.8 GeV, double the energy that was previously demonstrated. Charge was 5 pC at 7.8 GeV and up to 62 pC in 6 GeV peaks, and typical beam divergence was 0.2 mrad.

The self-channeling of ultrashort laser pulses through 20 m of air was demonstrated. The channeled pulse was measured to have 0.75 mJ of energy, a diameter of 80 microm FWHM, and a modulated spectrum. All these values were measured to be fairly constant during the propagation of the pulse. A preliminary model is shown to explain these results.

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.

Results of laser-induced breakdown experiments in fused silica (SiO2) employing 150 fs–7 ns, 780 nm laser pulses are reported. The avalanche ionization mechanism is found to dominate over the entire pulse-width range. Fluence breakdown threshold does not follow the scaling of Fth∼ √τp, when pulses are shorter than 10 ps. The impact ionization coefficient of SiO2 is measured up to ∼3×108 V/cm. The relative role of photoionization in breakdown for ultrashort pulses is discussed.