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I suppose the people in the ISS qualify as "high flyers", but NASA says that will be no risk for them

"On the International Space Station there is a special thick-walled room to which the astronauts have had to retreat during times of increased solar radiation."

I'm guessing they'll be using this. At least until they add a deflector dish to reroute main power through. ;-)

Also there was SLAC http://www.slac.stanford.edu/ and LEP http://hepwww.rl.ac.uk/public/bigbang/file9.html which were electron-positron colliders

This is certainly the first instance of Xray production from an FEL, but it's a far cry from the first Xray laser. While it's true that the SDI lasers were self-destructive, sub-10nm lasers have been produced from a number of modified atomic plasmas in sustainable laser formats http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/reports/1996-1997/pdf/16.pdf. Sorry about the pdf.

You've seen little advance because you're not reading much on the matter I think

this for instance

or that

or maybe this

In short we are within a factor 10 of achieving ignition, meaning a long, self-sustained fusion reaction outputting more energy than is expended to maintain it. In 1968 we were within a factor of 1000 of achieving this.

The ITER deadline for achieving his is 2020.

Using 15J, 15 fs means we have a better fireing rate than when you need to accumulate 1000 times more energy. The cooling time between shots is much shorter, so any study you want to do, can be done faster.

I'm not a scientist there, I just work on their data management pipeline. Look here for the science : http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/Facilities/AstraWeb/AstraGeminiSci1.htm

See the Vulcan Laser at CLF for more powerful laser : http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/Facilities/vulcan/laser.htm. They are currently drawing plans to upgrade it.

Using 15J, 15 fs means we have a better fireing rate than when you need to accumulate 1000 times more energy. The cooling time between shots is much shorter, so any study you want to do, can be done faster.

I'm not a scientist there, I just work on their data management pipeline. Look here for the science : http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/Facilities/AstraWeb/AstraGeminiSci1.htm

See the Vulcan Laser at CLF for more powerful laser : http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/Facilities/vulcan/laser.htm. They are currently drawing plans to upgrade it.

It looks like this. Pictures like that bring a tear to my eye. If you have even a small subset of those capacitors, you can do some seriously cool shit.

Article is wrong. Vulcan in the UK is a 1 petawatt laser, which is 3 times more powerful, and has been running since 2004:
http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/news/CLF_News/vulcanpetawatt.htm

They even have a plaque from the Guinness book of records.

Wasn't talking about normal pair-production, but rather zero-point energy of the vacuum and it's production of virtual particles, which are seen through the Casimir force. Whether or not this is a wild theory depends on how conservative you are when it comes to theoretical physics, I guess.

1973 Peter Kirstein at University College London (UCL) established the first transatlantic packet network link - Rutherford Laboratory IBM 360/195 in the UK linked through UCL and satellite link from Norway to ARPAnet. In November the RL machine is the most powerful on the ARPAnet

the total legal justification (from the US viewpoint) for running the network services between Arpanet and the UK networks between 1973 and 1988 was the need to test these developments with real traffic

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1976ucle.rept.....K

We've had one of those for a while now, on this side of the pond. http://www.isis.rl.ac.uk/ They are building a second target at the site, due to open in 2008.

Almost every reply seems to think that the only chips in existence are digital. If you are thinking of a digital design then, as the others said, FPGAs are the way to go - certainly for prototyping.

If you need an analogue device or want chip scale packaging of your device, then an asic would be more appropriate. It is possible that FPGAs are available in very small packages but I'm not very up on that.

If you're in Europe, the Europractice scheme provides access to Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) runs to reduce overall fabrication costs. They also provide the software and design kits that allow you to make your designs.

My price breakdown for a 10sqmm chip in the AMS C35B4 process (0.35um, 4 metal, 2 poly, high res) with 20 devices in CSOIC28 packages:

Full Europractice membership (annual): €900
Cadence IC package single license: €1800
Cadence IC package maintenance (might not be applicable for the first year): €1150
10sqmm of AMS C35B4 silicon @ €720/sqmm: €7200
20 packages @ €52/package: €1040

Total: €10,940 or €12,090

Non of the prices include any local taxes.

They also do low volume production, but I don't know anything about the pricing.

So how to bring that down? You could save €1800/€2950 on software by using free alternatives such as on this

Don't be influenced by your opinions of current design processes. We use a 0.35um process all the time. It's perfectly adequate for what we want to do - in fact in many ways it is better than smaller processes for us. You could save a lot of money by going to a coarser process such as the AMIS 0.7um (2 metal, 1 poly) at €360/sqmm or the AMIS 0.5um (3 metal, 1 poly) at €420/sqmm - both with a smaller minimum size at 8sqmm. Silicon cost would then be €2880 or €3360 compared to €7200. 8sqmm is quite a lot really.

Ultimately, you need to decide what you need. If you need analogue circuitry but don't need linear capacitors, go for the cheapest process. If you do need linear caps, you'll have to use a process with 2 poly layers. If you want digital as well, go for something finer and with more metal layers

While the results from this package should be in broad agreement with manufacturers' SPECmark ratings, they will provide a more realistic performance estimate for Starlink machines. SPECmark ratings tend to indicate the potential that it is possible to realise with a machine rather than the performance that will actually be returned when running `real' applications.

Here. Fusion takes place everywhere, all the time, although usually at such fantastically low rates that it is for all intents and purposes negligible. The 13-Jupiter mass threshold is for sustained fusion of deuterium; below that threshold, some D-D fusion still takes place.

It's too bad that the only planets we can reliably locate at this time are the freaky-deeky ones that are too massive, too close to their primary, or are in orbits far too elliptical to give life a decent chance...each new system looks like a good example of how not to design a solar system capable of sustaining life.
Hopefully, this will change when the interferometer goes up around 2015.

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"Each laser charges up to one terrajoule of energy, then outputs one terrawatt for one second."

Juuust slightly off...by a factor of a billion or so! :-) Actually the NIF will fire each of its 192 beams simultaneously with an energy of ~10kJ for a duration of 2-3 nanoseconds for a total of nearly 2 MJ on the target. The overall power of the laser will be somewhere near 500 Terawatts (trillion watts) and despite what the AP article says, that will never secure its stature as being the "worlds most powerful", that title is currently held by the Rutherford Appleton laboratory's Vulcan Petawatt laser, capable of achieving nearly 1 thousand trillion watts of power. The OMEGA EP laser, to be completed in 1-2 years will achieve over 2 Petawatts of power. These lasers only deliver few kJ total energy though.

I heard this from Dantzing himself in a pleneray at the International Synmposium on Mathematical Programming at Lausanne in 1997:

In that old days, where computers were new toys, the term programmin had the conotation of "planning". If I remember well, Dantzing said that one of the first uses of the Simplex was to help the Air Force to plan its operations during the war.

As for the non-implementability of gradient based methods in computers. They are as implementable as ODE solvers. This is the domain of floating point numbers, there is no exact implementations of methods. However, there are many good solvers out there solving thousands of real world problems every day. Since I come from academia, I can said some good solvers emerging from universities: the Galahad library, whose web page also provides a list of other good solver like Minos, Knitro, Snopt, Loqo. There is also TANGO which was written and is mantained by some good friends of mine, and the Open Source (CPL) IPOPT.

Things don't stop there. There also many methods non non-smooth problems that employ generalization of the classical concept of gradient and Hessians, like bundle methods from Lemarechal and company, or generalized Newton methos (from Qi and company) and much more.

Optimization is a very rich field from both practical and theoretical aspects. That's why work with it.

I heard this from Dantzing himself in a pleneray at the International Synmposium on Mathematical Programming at Lausanne in 1997:

In that old days, where computers were new toys, the term programmin had the conotation of "planning". If I remember well, Dantzing said that one of the first uses of the Simplex was to help the Air Force to plan its operations during the war.

As for the non-implementability of gradient based methods in computers. They are as implementable as ODE solvers. This is the domain of floating point numbers, there is no exact implementations of methods. However, there are many good solvers out there solving thousands of real world problems every day. Since I come from academia, I can said some good solvers emerging from universities: the Galahad library, whose web page also provides a list of other good solver like Minos, Knitro, Snopt, Loqo. There is also TANGO which was written and is mantained by some good friends of mine, and the Open Source (CPL) IPOPT.

Things don't stop there. There also many methods non non-smooth problems that employ generalization of the classical concept of gradient and Hessians, like bundle methods from Lemarechal and company, or generalized Newton methos (from Qi and company) and much more.

Optimization is a very rich field from both practical and theoretical aspects. That's why work with it.

uhmmm...yeah, so I RTFA and I'm really curious as to where the X-ray laser demo is going to take place... X-ray lasers aren't like pocket laser pointers. There are only a few places in the world that can achieve them. Either you use a MASSIVE laser which focuses on a piece of metal forming an ultrahot plasma that can lase superradiantly (without a resonator cavity because the gain is so high in the lasing plasma) for a few nanoseconds (first demonstrated on the NOVA laser at LLNL in 1984) OR you use a huge ass particle (electrons) accelerator to form a free electron laser with a magnetic undulator. In fact, I don't think X-ray FELs have been achieved anywhere on earth yet, period. I would guess that the only lasers in europe capable of making an X-ray laser are the Vulcan at the CCLRC in the UK and maybe LULI in France. So how is this happening in Brussels?

I don't know about you, but when you meantioned the headmouse things, this is the first thing that came into my mind.

"Plus, such an atmospheric desent probe cannot have directional antennas (other than maybe "not down"), reducing the bandwidth."

Right, but this is so frustrating!! It's what's placed constraints on data bandwidth since we've been sending probes to ...well anywhere.

If we're ever to increase the science returns from these missions there must be a way around this somehow. Optical transmission is out of the question right away obviously because of the even higer limit on pointing accuracy and attenuation prblems associated with the atmosphere. But what about a phased array transmitter? The problem with using directional radio transmitters to increase the signal/noise ratio on a decending atmospheric probe is obvious - conventionally, you'd need to use a dish to concentrate the beam in a particualr diretion (just like cassini's high gain antenna) and you'd need to continually re-point this dish as you're falling and turning under the parachute. You would lose track of where to keep pointed after just a few seconds of this. But what if you had a transmitter on the orbiting reciever spacecraft that sent a pure tone to the falling probe and small a directional reciever (which did not need to be pointed) on the probe? It would be easy to determine at least roughly where the signal was coming from as you were moving and rotating and with a phased array transmitter you could continually re-point the radio beam in this direction instantly, without moving any physical antenna. Phased array techniques are fairly new, I wonder, has this ever been considered before?

• Iodine gets absorbed into your thyroid (nasty), and if it's radioactive, then you're probably in a bad place
• Caesium exists naturally in sea water
• Strontium is chemically similar to Calcium, and thus ends up in your bones and will probably give you Leuikemia
• Xenon is a noble gas, so trace amounts of radioactive isotopes probably aren't harmful
• Barium is highly reactive, and most of it's isotopes have very short half-lifes. Don't know what the biological consequences are of Barium waste.

Well, almost all. There are a couple of difficulties with respect to pointing. Even under a sixth of normal gravity, you still need a much beefier structure to rigidly support a telescope on the Moon, compared to the same object in space. Particularly when the direction of that gravitational force changes as you tilt the telescope to follow objects.

In principle, you could build a space telescope of hundreds of meters in diameter, and it wouldn't sag. You'd have to brace it a bit for aiming motions, but you can do those at a hundredth of a gee, not a sixth--and the stress is off again once you're aimed.

For a really big telescope, that's another advantage of being in space--you don't have to move it while imaging. Point it, and it keeps looking at the same object for as long as you want to integrate. On the Moon, you have to track objects across the sky.

The ESA's Darwin project proposes a free-flying array of six(!) 1.5 meter telescopes up to five hundred meters apart, with their relative positions controlled to within micrometers to do optical interferometry. They want to be able to do things like 40 day exposures to measure the spectra of extrasolar planets and possibly detect life. I don't mean to suggest that such a facility isn't possible on the Moon, but assembling and reconfiguring it (if necessary) is probably a lot easier in space where you don't have to pour concrete foundations.

Looking at the redshift of some common spectral line will give you an immediate answer. What I want to know is if the neutrino pulse was detected at one of our observatories like super kamiokande like supernova 1987a was. This one is much further away so I don't know if it was possible....

Pu-238 is great for a radioisotope generator. Imagine if your cell phone had a battery that lasted 20 years before being recycled into a new battery! Pu-239 can't even boil water, but it's that stuff that can be used for Nuclear Fission. I'm doubting that anyone would dispose of that.

Pu-241 is pretty rare AFAIK. I think it can be used for fission. If it can't, it would be great for batteries. If I understand this info correctly, Its decay is entirely beta and alpha particles! That makes it even safer (in a seal container) than Pu-238!

There have been big projects like SETI@home, Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, RC5-64 and many others.

There are some like the Casino-21 http://www.climate-dynamics.rl.ac.uk/ and Evolution-at-Home http://www.evolutionary-research.org/ too.

It's becoming easier to create the required code for distributed projects, and it most certanly has become easier to actaully get them distributed.

The Transit of Venus is a phenomena witnessed very seldomly -- in fact, next Tuesday's transit will be the first witnessable from Earth since 1882. (Google News points to hundreds of stories.) The transit of a planet occurs when it passes between another and the sun, thus only transits of Mercury and Venus are possible from Earth. It will begin at 05:13 Universal Time, which is 9:13pm July 7 on the US West Coast (more info), and it will last several hours. NASA has a map that shows when and where it will be viewable (more maps here), some safety tips for properly viewing the sun, and a Sun-Earth Day 2004 web site with lots more, including where to find webcasts. This Transit of Venus FAQ should answer many of your questions, including why transits of Venus follow a regular pattern of recurrence at intervals of 8, 121.5, 8, and 105.5 years. FYI, The event won't be visible in North American sky until the sun rises, and by then it will be almost over. If you miss this one, you'll have one more chance at it on June 6, 2012, when the transit will be most visible the Pacific.

(I submitted this to Slashdot several days ago; I was rejected.)

An extensive range of astronomy software is available through the UK's Starlink project

Oops I misspoke, I meant to say the Omega laser is actually the most ENERGETIC UV laser in the world at ~30Kilojoules/shot, Not the most powerfull, as there are a few other chirped pulse lasers with higher powers out there but not higher energies(most can only do a few hundred J per shot though this is still enough to do direct laser induced nuclear reactions).

The reason for this? They accidentally uploaded the Ariane 4 software to the Ariane 5 before launch. Needless to say, the rockets didn't work exactly the same. :-)

This math bug caused both the primary and backup computers to hang.

They didn't use the Ariane 4 software by accident. They intentionally re-used the software (presumably with some constants changed) and tried to save money by omitting thorough re-testing.

See section 2.1 of the report on the Ariane 5 failure for a full explanation of how it happened.

SPSS has been around since 1968. Check out the very fascinating history of this program here. BTW, I still have a card deck with the original Fortran source code, from 1971, when I ran it on an IBM 1130 minicomputer. Kermit was born c. 1980, and in contrast is "just a kid." Possibly the truly oldest continuously supported software -- which is open source -- is the Fortran IV Scientific Subroutine Library (I have a copy dating back to 1962, which was based on the Fortran II library, which is presumably older but no longer supported). The library was eventually codified as an ANSI standard in 1977. A capsule history is at fit.edu. You can access an archive of the Fortran source code at Harwell's..

Sorry, that was meant to be this URL. The sphere project was a project to, well, change the shape of a Tokamak's torus so that the eccentricity approached 1 (i.e., a sphere).

So this must be pure science fiction? And this research is also fiction, then? If not, then laser energy can superheat air and cause sound problems. Why would it be so ridiculous for me to think a laser the size of a basketball hoop might not have the same effect? (Of course, if I had RTFA more carefully, I might have seen the energy reference -- you're right, it's small-scale.)

Why does air have to be turned into "superhot plasma" to make a sonic boom? A supersonic jet doesn't superheat air, per se, it displaces it. A nighthawk doesn't superheat the air, but produces a sonic boom with its tailfeathers.

And since when did anyone say anything about outer space? The event is happening in Colorado. (Not far from outer space, actually, but...)

And you don't have to be a jerk about how incredibly knowledgeable you are -- we get it without the barbs.

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Why couldn't we put this lab in orbit?

The main reason is that the effect is so weak. A mission concept called LISA is being studied by ESA and NASA. The idea is to have 6 spacecraft orbiting the Sun, which together form a interferometer several million kilometers in size. The catch: Because the waves are so weak, the distances between these spacecraft would need to be controlled to within about a nanometer (!) to have any hope of detecting a signal. Needless to say a VERY challenging mission.

A lot of other interesting missions would be enabled by good formation flight technology. Look at NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder mission, or the ESA's similar Darwin mission.

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First, you have to write Gay software, such as this Gay Software and license it under the GGPL.

Second, you need to succeed in gathering a few "Gay Users" on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website

Third, you need to contact Richard Stallman, creator of the GGPL, and ask him to sacrifice a straight person for you in the name of All Fags.

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0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a Gay regime (such as blue plastic dicks, or a frozen potato reference) placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this Gay General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under Vatican law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "a fag". Activities other than copying, distribution, modification, or cock sucking are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does. (Serve the gay community.) 1. A fag may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it (up the ass), in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice, Gay pornographic image, and disclaimer of warranty or straightness; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program. A fag may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. You may also offer AIDS ribbons and rainbow tattoos, as well. A fag must also embed a gay demeanor in his software. The mention of the following items MUST BE INCLUDED in each piece of GGPL software. A blue, plastic cock. An AIDS ribbon. A frozen piece of shit. A cock ring (with or without razor blades.) KY Jelly. Anal warts/tearings. Billy Mays. Distribution of GGPL software without the inclusion of these gay items is strictly against the code of Gay Software Programmers, and a fag lawsuit will ensue. Please make note of this and include one, if not all, of the Official Gay Items in your software. The GGPL rest

You can major in an image viewer at MIT?

This could prove to be the most important use of this technique, as most proposed Grand Unified Theories have interactions that can turn quarks into leptons, so that a proton would be expected to eventually decay into a positron and a meson. Unfortunately, this process has never been observed (well, only somewhat unfortunately, as high proton stability is definitely a Good Thing in most ways), and experiment and theory have thus set a lower bound on the lifetime of a proton of roughly 10^33 years, about 23 orders of magnitude greater than the estimated current age of the universe.

As you can see, compared to the suggested lifetime of a proton, even Bi-209 seems unstable. The expected extreme rarity of a proton decay event, however, is somewhat balanced by the overwhelming abundance of protons in the universe.The "lifetime" for an individual proton is more like a life expectancy, an average figure- given a suitably large collection of protons, odds are good that at least one would decay in a reasonable timeframe. If you carefully watch 10^33 protons for a year, for example, and reality agrees with theory (big if), then it is likely (certainly not guaranteed though) you will see at least one decay event. Now, 10^33 may sound like a tremendous amount, but remember that each proton has a mass of only 1.67*10^-27 kilograms, so that 10^33 protons would have a mass of about 1,600 metric tons- a lot, but not outrageous.

The real problem lies in that "carefully watching" part. So many other forms of radiation are much more prevalent, and so might mask the signature of proton decay. Cosmic rays, naturally occuring radioisotopes in places you'd never think to look, solar neutrinos, that sort of thing. Ah, why yes, this is one of those experiments they do in a salt mine and uses a gigantic tank of ultrapure water (your proton source). However, as of yet, no one has found concrete evidence for proton decay from one of these experiments. Go here for a excellent site about a proton decay detector that ran in the 80s, and here for one currently in use.

Perhaps this process will detect this very rare event, lending profound support to one of the many supersymmetric models out there. Unfortunately, if it does not detect proton decay, it will be much more difficult to say just what the result means, it being difficult to prove a negative and all.

As a technician on the Omega Laser I guess have a bit of an inside track on what's going on around the LLE.

First you must make a distinction between most powerful(energy/time) laser and most energetic(energy per pulse) laser, this is a distinction not made in the article. The Omega laser is currently the most energetic ultraviolet(frequency tripled Neodymium:Glass) laser in the world now at ~25 Kilojoules per pulse, very soon to be eclipsed by the preliminary first light of the National Ignition Facility. However each "shot" on the system, as they are called, is only a couple hundred picoseconds to a couple nanoseconds long (depending on the shot pulse shape) making it's peak power around a maximum of about 60 Terawatts. This is not the most powerful laser in the world. The Rutherford Appelton laboratory in England has a "Petawatt" system they just commissioned which is capable of at least hundreds of Terawatts of power albeit only with a couple hundred joules of energy per shot.

It is interesting to note that the mechanism the Petawatt upgrade at the LLE will use to achieve it's million billion watts of power in a pulse time of a few picoseconds to hundreds of femtoseconds is called Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification(OPCPA) and was invented right at THE UofR in the late 1980's!! Chirped Pulse Amplification lasers are the only means to get to petawatt intensities and they are interesting because they are the first technology to allow nuclear reactions to be directly caused by intense light radiation(ie. no implosion/ heating stage as in ICF). This is really interesting because in addition to the spark plug type inertial confinement fusion catalyzing experiments that are planned, the intensity fluences allowed by petawatt lasers approaches (possibly >10^21 watts/sq. inch) what is necessary to do an experiment called "sparking the vacuum" whereby enough energy is placed in a small enough volume of space in a short enough period of time to cause a spontaneous transformation of energy directly into particles(via E=Mc^2). Neat eh?

This isn't really news, being that the Vulcan laser in the UK reached petawatt capacity some months ago, after being awarded a grant for the purpose four years ago (see here) - the article doesn't mention the exact capacity, but I don't imagine that it's much more than a petawatt.

Another important thing to mention - again, not having read up on this - is that most scientific lasers are single-shot; most lasers are femto or petasecond lasers. From the same site as above (different news item, "Over the course of the three year upgrade project, the output of Vulcan's ultra-short pulse beam will be increased to 500J in a pulse of 500fs duration giving a power on target of 1 Petawatt (1015 Watts)" - for many purposes, a laser such as Astra suits many peoples purposes; whilst the pulse energy for astra is

As far as military applications are concerned, as mentioned in other threads, this laser would almost certainly be useless; it would be far too hard to aim, and in any case, lasers like this reach sufficient power that they require nitrogen-filled tubing in many laboratories in order not to ionise the air under certain circumstances (which creates irritating popping noises) - there are certain other technical details (such as the beam type) which render them inefficient for military purposes (although one scientist working with astra and vulcan did want to shoot a beam into space with an encyclopedia encoded in the beam pulse in order to transmit data to potential victims of human first contact).

This isn't really news, being that the Vulcan laser in the UK reached petawatt capacity some months ago, after being awarded a grant for the purpose four years ago (see here) - the article doesn't mention the exact capacity, but I don't imagine that it's much more than a petawatt.

Another important thing to mention - again, not having read up on this - is that most scientific lasers are single-shot; most lasers are femto or petasecond lasers. From the same site as above (different news item, "Over the course of the three year upgrade project, the output of Vulcan's ultra-short pulse beam will be increased to 500J in a pulse of 500fs duration giving a power on target of 1 Petawatt (1015 Watts)" - for many purposes, a laser such as Astra suits many peoples purposes; whilst the pulse energy for astra is

As far as military applications are concerned, as mentioned in other threads, this laser would almost certainly be useless; it would be far too hard to aim, and in any case, lasers like this reach sufficient power that they require nitrogen-filled tubing in many laboratories in order not to ionise the air under certain circumstances (which creates irritating popping noises) - there are certain other technical details (such as the beam type) which render them inefficient for military purposes (although one scientist working with astra and vulcan did want to shoot a beam into space with an encyclopedia encoded in the beam pulse in order to transmit data to potential victims of human first contact).

This isn't really news, being that the Vulcan laser in the UK reached petawatt capacity some months ago, after being awarded a grant for the purpose four years ago (see here) - the article doesn't mention the exact capacity, but I don't imagine that it's much more than a petawatt.

Another important thing to mention - again, not having read up on this - is that most scientific lasers are single-shot; most lasers are femto or petasecond lasers. From the same site as above (different news item, "Over the course of the three year upgrade project, the output of Vulcan's ultra-short pulse beam will be increased to 500J in a pulse of 500fs duration giving a power on target of 1 Petawatt (1015 Watts)" - for many purposes, a laser such as Astra suits many peoples purposes; whilst the pulse energy for astra is

As far as military applications are concerned, as mentioned in other threads, this laser would almost certainly be useless; it would be far too hard to aim, and in any case, lasers like this reach sufficient power that they require nitrogen-filled tubing in many laboratories in order not to ionise the air under certain circumstances (which creates irritating popping noises) - there are certain other technical details (such as the beam type) which render them inefficient for military purposes (although one scientist working with astra and vulcan did want to shoot a beam into space with an encyclopedia encoded in the beam pulse in order to transmit data to potential victims of human first contact).

Although these experiments are performed deep underground, like neutrino, experiments their physics is somewhat different. Dark matter experiments are aimed at finding new fundamental particles as yet unknown to physics. Neutrino experiments, on the otherhand, study the properities of neutrinos and it is these experiments (SNO, SuperKamiokande) which have produced the exciting discovery of neutrino oscillations.

The reason dark matter is such an interesting field at the moment is because of the WMAP result. This indicates that only ~5% of the universe is what we call "baryonic matter" i.e. the stuff that we are made of. A further ~20% is made up of non-baryonic matter. This includes things like neutrinos, but just neutrinos is nowhere near enough. So, if we believe the WMAP result, there is a sizeable amount of matter which we cannot account for given our current understanding of physics.

However, dark matter experiments are not the only ones out there looking for this missing mass. I'm working on a collider experiment called D0 on the Tevatron collider at Fermilab near Chicago. This is currently the highest energy collider in the world (until the LHC at CERN, Geneva starts in ~2006). As such it is an excellent place to look for new physics and one such example is something called SuperSymmetry. You can essentially think of this as a symmetery between force and matter (in technical terms its a symmetry between fermions and bosons) and it doubles the number of fundamental particles.

So how does this explain the dark matter? Well, a lot of supersymmetrical models have the lightest supersymmetric particle being stable i.e. it cannot decay. Now being neutral, stable and weakly interacting, this would be an ideal candidate for dark matter and might make up the missing mass of the universe. So instead of looking for these particles scattering off nuclei (as dark matter experiments do) we can actually look to see if we can make them in high energy interactions.

Some interesting web sites you might like to read for more information are

• UK Dark Matter Collaboration
• D0 Public Information Page
• The Particle Adventure: Basic explanation of particle physics

To show that neutrinos have mass, it suffices to observe solar neutrinos and look for changes in neutrino flavour. Last I heard, although large regions in which the neutrino masses could have lain had been ruled out, the evidence was mounting in favour of flavour changes and neutrinos having mass.

However, with all I've heard about neutrino studies over the last few years in a Nuclear Physics department, this article doesn't give enough information to let me work out if I already know of the experiment or not (though I probably have attended seminars by associated researchers; these projects are not exactly three-person exercises capable of being missed!) They don't even give the experiment's *name* - NOMAD, CHORUS, SNO, etc (many listed on this page)

The article *might* be referring to the UK Dark Matter Collaboration who apparently look for neutralinos instead (neutralinos appear to crop up deep inside what we Nuclear Physicists call 'Particle Physics', which is full of leptons and mesons and other fun particles, fine, and some of the most brain-bending mathematics it has been my priviledge to not understand.)

Rachel

More about IBM and Cern- Gridcomputingplanet

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The Large Electron Positron Collider at Cern-Hepwww