Nuclear Photonics

High power lasers have been promoted for decades for research aiming at two important applications: 
The compression and heating of nuclear fusion fuel, and the realization of compact particle accelerators.

The pursuit for realizing these applications has brought high power lasers to university-scale laboratories, 
and led to  discoveries about the nature of light-matter interaction in an intensity regime never reached before.

I will overview this field of research, now known as Nuclear Photonics,
and specifically tell on the interaction of relativistic light with wavelength-scale objects, 
on the role of the atomic number in coupling relativistic laser pulses to MeV particles, 
and on tests of QED in the non-linear regime.