From single ion to single pion

The first RIS conference held in Gatlinburg, Tennessee in 1981 demonstrated conclusively that tuned lasers could be used to detect, particularly atoms, in very small quantities even down to single atom levels. Since then the field has matured as the lasers have developed. Recently a number of laboratories have shown that molecules can be detected with high intensity, short pulse lasers with minimum fragmentation. A natural extension of this work is to bathe atoms in short pulse beams of terawatt and petawatt lasers (greater than the total electrical output of the USA). At these intensities the ponderomotive forces are so great that the atomic electrons are accelerated to multi MeV energies and we enter the regime of laser induced nuclear physics