Future facilities operating petawatt lasers are looking to attempt carrying out further experiments along these lines. “The quantum vacuum is filled with energy fluctuations from which virtual electron-positron pairs arise,” Zhang said in a study recently published in . These weren’t just any lasers, either—they were petawatt lasers. Multi-petawatt lasers such as Romania’s Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) can blast double laser beams at 10 petawatts each. Especially once we bring the next wave of petawatt lasers online.