Extreme light: An intense pursuit of fundamental high energy physics

By the compression of petawatt pulses to multi-exawatt, a new route for the generation of Schwinger intensities capable of producing highenergy radiation and particle beams with extremely short time structure down to the attosecond-zeptosecond regime is being presented. Far from the traditional laser investigation in the eV regime, this laser-based approach offers a new paradigm to investigate the structure of vacuum and applications to subatomic physics.