The magnetic fields produced in the interaction of intense laser pulses and dense plasmas may enable researchers to test models of neutron stars and white dwarfs in the lab, suggests a team of European scientists.

The group, which includes members from Imperial College London, reported the generation of peak magnetic fields of nearly 109 G at the 44th annual meeting of the American Physical Society's plasma physics division in November.

In the team's experiments, polarized 1-ps, 90-J pulses of 1054-nm radiation from the Vulcan laser at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, UK, were focused to intensities of approximately 10²⁰ W/cm² on thin, solid targets. Two polarimeters measured the induced ellipticities in the high-harmonic radiation produced in the experiments, which indicate the magnitude of the fields.