| Abstract: | 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.
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