Texans Build World's Most Powerful Laser

Subject: Texans Build World's Most Powerful Laser Wed Apr 09, 2008 11:35 pm

One of these days... fucks like these are gonna blow us all up... motherfuckers!!!

Texans Build World's Most Powerful Laser Lasercompressor1ke9

Scientists have switched on the world's most powerful laser, which for one-trillionth of a second is 2,000 times more powerful than all the power plants in the United States. The laser's output tops a petawatt, which is a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) watts of power.

In the basement of the physics building at the University of Texas at Austin, the school's High Intensity Laser Science Group built a petawatt laser in hopes of recreating astronomical phenomena like supernovae in miniature.

"We can put materials into states that you can't access here on earth," said Mikael Martinez, the laser project's manager. "You'd have to go out into space and hang out with an exploding star to observe what we plan to observe here in Texas."

When the scientists turned on the laser on March 31, it became the world's most powerful operational laser, but it doesn't yet hold the record for the most powerful laser ever built. That honor, at least for a few more months, belongs to the now mothballed Nova laser built at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The Nova produced 1.25 petawatts of power when it was first switched on in 1996. Martinez said he expected his project to break that record within the year, reaching between 1.3 and 1.5 petawatts.

Below, we take a virtual walk through the tech -- amplifiers, compressors and crystals -- that make this Texas-size laser so powerful.

The power of a laser, its output in watts, is determined by the energy of the laser pulse, measured in joules, divided by its duration, measured in seconds (tiny fractions of a second in this case). So, to get high power, you can either turn up the energy or cram the same amount of energy into a shorter duration pulse -- or do both. The problem is that turning up the energy makes it more difficult to get short pulses.

The solution to this problem require an almost Rube-Goldberg setup inside a 1,500-square-foot cleanroom. The most powerful laser in the world starts, poetically enough, with a "seed laser" that puts out a wimpy nanojoule of energy for a couple hundred femtoseconds (that's 10-15 seconds). It must be run through a series of amplifiers, compressors, and stretchers before it can recreate the conditions inside the sun for a trillionth of a second.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/texans-build-wo.html

Texans Build World's Most Powerful Laser

Texans Build World's Most Powerful Laser

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