A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space is at the heart of a major new scientific project that aims to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the universe. Capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it would be equivalent to the power received by the Earth from the sun focused onto a speck smaller than the tip of a pin, scientists claim it could allow them to boil the very fabric of space — the vacuum.

Contrary to popular belief, a vacuum is not devoid of material but in fact fizzles with mysterious particles that pop in and out of existence, but at speeds so fast that no one has been able to prove that they exist.

Scientists say that the Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility would allow them to reveal these particles by pulling this vacuum “fabric” apart. They also believe it could allow them to prove whether extra dimensions exist.

“This laser will be 200 times more powerful than the most powerful lasers that now exist,” said John Collier, scientific leader for the ELI project and director of the Central Laser Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, Oxfordshire. “At this kind of intensity we start to get into unexplored territory.”

The ELI ultra-high field laser is due to be completed by the end of the decade and will cost an estimated £1 billion. The European Commission has already approved plans to build three other lasers that will form part of the ELI project and will be prototypes for the ultra-high field laser. Due to be sited in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, each laser will cost around £200 million and will become operational in 2015.

The ultra-high field laser will be made up of 10 beams, each twice as powerful as the prototype lasers, allowing it to produce 200 petawatts — more than 100,000 times the world’s combined electricity production — for less than a trillionth of a second.

The huge amount of energy needed to produce a laser beam of this strength is stored over time before it is fired to produce beams several feet wide that are then combined and focused on to a tiny spot, much like sunlight through a magnifying glass. At the focal point, the intensity of light will produce conditions so extreme that they do not even exist in the sun’s centre.

It will cause the mysterious particles of matter and antimatter which are thought to make up a vacuum to be pulled apart, allowing scientists to detect the tiny electrical charges they produce. These “ghost particles” normally annihilate one another as soon as they appear, but by using the laser to pull them apart, physicists believe they will be able to detect them.

It could help to explain the mystery of why the universe contains far more matter than we have been able to detect, by revealing what so-called dark matter really is. The conditions generated at the focal point of the laser may also be sufficient to allow scientists to see how the particles inside atoms behave for the first time.

Wolfgang Sandner, coordinator of the Laserlab Europe network and president of the German Physics Society, said: “We are taught to think of the vacuum as empty space, but it seems even a true vacuum is filled with pairs of molecules that come into our universe for an extremely short time. An extremely powerful laser should be able to pull these particles apart and keep them in existence for longer. There are many challenges to be overcome before we can do that, but it is mainly a matter of scaling up the technology we have so we can produce the power needed.”

Scientists at the Centre for Advanced Laser Technology and Applications are already developing technology that will be essential for producing such powerful lasers. The centre is one of the prime candidates for the ultra-high field laser. However, it faces competition from sites in Russia, France, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic.

As well as offering new insights, scientists say that the ELI lasers will be able to produce new laser-based treatments for cancer. Dr Thomas Heinzl, an associate professor of theoretical physics at Plymouth University, said: “ELI is going to take us into an uncharted regime of physics. There could well be some surprises along the way.”