Progress towards experimental realisation of QED-plasmas

Several large-scale multi-PW laser facilities are being designed or commissioned worldwide, with the expectation of achieving focused intensities exceeding 10^23 W/cm^2 in the near future. At these intensities, the corresponding laser electromagnetic fields are so strong in the laser focus that the plasma rapidly created there is dominated by the feedback between strong field QED and classical plasma processes. These 'QED-plasmas' are relatively poorly understood theoretically and related experiments are still in their infancy. The scale of the challenge is apparent if we consider that in strong field QED, i.e. QED in the presence of strong background electromagnetic fields, even the dynamics of a single electron in an arbitrary field cannot currently be solved from first principles. Yet it is essential that we improve our understanding of QED-plasmas if multi-PW laser-plasma interactions are to be understood. I will disiucss progress we have made towards probing QED-plamas with current PW lasers and disucss the implications of this work for multi-PW laser-plasma experiments.