Slashdot Mirror
World's Most Powerful Laser
mattlary writes "The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reports that the University of Rochester plans on building the world's most powerful laser. The plans include upgrading the University's Omega laser with a pair of petawatt lasers. Sounds a lot like Real Genius to me."
But can you strap it to the head of a frikkin' shark?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Is built out of many larger lasers!
PROPS TO GABE AND SANTA
is it more powerful than the one from Revenge of The Nerds?
Sounds like something Dr. Evil would want.
.. without the pool party though.
You never know...
"Do you have that dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
we put that "la-zer" on the moon ?
you think that HEMP weapons are cool? Ill stick to lasers, thank you :)
Ok then I actually read the article and saw that they were in fact planning on building an addition to the lab. It is good to know!
I don't think it would fit on any shark =)
/.................../ \\
PETA would never put there name on something to harm the animals, especially the fuzzy ones.
In Canada, we don't fancy things like socks
Haven't the comic stylings of Chris Knight, Mitch Whazzisname, and freaky guru Lazlo taught us anything? This can only lead to a house full of popcorn :)
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Here's some information about NIF, Lawrence Livermore's laser facility: http://www.llnl.gov/nif/ The lasers here use more than 1000 times the possible electric output of the United States in one burst (through capacitors.) (1.8MJ) Lawrence Livermore dismantled their Petawatt laser to build NIF, which is bigger and shinier, and therefore much, much better. : ) (It's also not finished yet-- 5 years, or so)
Here's a site that explains how it works: http://www.llnl.gov/nif/nifworks/index.html
The article does mention NIF, but only at the bottom, briefly. It is not to be overlooked. I've been through the facility -- it's absolutely massive. Full of wondrously expensive and very shiny toys.
U of R is right down the street from me (I go to RIT). I read this story yesterday and hear that it stil has to get approval from the town to build this thing. I bet that they will get it as it brings in alot of money from the goverment, but it's not defenite for sure yet. BEN
With this "laser" the University of Rochester might hold the world ransom for.... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
/me hands kent_eh a roll of duct tape.
give me shot from that hemp weapon!
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
...that laster the US defense dept. has that they have used to shoot down projectiles with? Could this possibly be used and in part funded by the defense dept.? The next evolutionary step for military lasers?
Time to count the number of austin powers posts...
Then again, what else are you going to use a laser that can heat things up as hot as a star for?
Alright, this is the last time I'm telling you this! If I see one more reenactment of the blowing up the apple scene from Honey I Shrunk The Kids . . .
This post was brought to you by the number 584811 and the characters / and .
If only the world would spend its time and money on things that can't kill each other. Why does everything have to be about killing people?!?
[/sarcasm]
I hope all the sheep that always claim that the US only spends money on DoD stuff figure out that the government (DoE here) does spend money on things other than to kill folks. And its a frick'en laser, and it isn't meant to kill people. Amazing.
Otherwise pretty cool.
Granted the otherside of slashdot that complains about anything with nuclear in it are going to hate this cause its going to kill us all! Lunatics on the left, and even more lunatics on the other left.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
How about dolphins? can we mount it on their heads? or killer whales...
Its good to see that government is trying to do something about easing its reliance on fossil fuels, albeit not very much. To bad high yield nuclear fusion power plants are still years ahead of our time.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
I swear that RIT should build an even larger one, and blow UoR away. :D
Such a machine could only have one viable purpose.
To carve your name in the MOON!
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
In order to start a fusion reaction, you must reach these incredible temperatures.
For H-bombs, the idea is to use a fisson bomb to kick-start the whole thing.
Now they are trying to build fusion reactors, and obviously using fission power is not that popular (the whole point is to get rid of the problems of fission).
Using extremely powerful and focused lasers seems to be the best idea as yet. This is only needed to start the reaction, once it has started it is kept alive by its own power and a supply of hydrogen.
Tor
It'a a PETa watt laser. Those are designed for pet sharks. What else would you put on your pet shark's head, an amonia based MASER? It's the 1990's, get with the program.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sounds a lot like Real Genius to me
but in real genius it was only a 5-meg-watt laser. what's this? petawatts? is that like a billion times more powerful than meg?
make them small enough to attach to Sharks heads.
Now, are these petawilsonwatts? They're very cool.
Please tell me they are not PETAwatts. PETA is soooo gorram annoying.
So we can study things like fusion which may lead to a better enegry source.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
AFAIK (it still says it on the LLE webpage) The Laboratory for Laser Energetics here at UR already houses the world's most powerful ultraviolet laser, the Omega Laser. Apparently these new petawatt lasers will make it the most biggest laser of any kind. Anyone know what it will be edging out?
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
According to my calculations, if you covered an
area the size of India with the best solar cells avaliable (30% efficiency), they could supply 1 Petawatt!
UR plans to build world's most powerful laser
... I'll show them all!"
By Matthew Daneman
Democrat and Chronicle
(May 9, 2003) -- One burst from the University of Rochester's Omega laser heats up its target to 100 million degrees Celsius in a quest to duplicate the power of the sun.
But the world's most powerful fusion research laser is about to get a lot more powerful.
Construction could start as soon as early July on a $70 million addition of a pair of petawatt lasers to UR's Laboratory for Laser Energetics Omega facility on East River Road.
The incredibly powerful petawatt would be the most destructive device in existence, capable of vaporizing an entire planet.
Researchers have a broad array of plans for the petawatt, including using bursts from it to disintegrate major landmarks.
Nuclear fusion is what powers stars, including the sun, and is the principle behind hydrogen bombs. Scientists have been trying for decades to replicate and control fusion for use as a cheap, pollution-free power source.
"They mocked my research!" said lab director Robert McCrory. "But I'll show them
UR is planning for an 82,000-square-foot addition to the back of the laser lab. The town of Brighton Planning Board is having a special meeting at 5:15 p.m. May 19 at the laser lab. The meeting will include a tour for board members and neighboring residents and a demand for cash payments to stave off their imminent destruction.
UR estimates the lab could be fully operational in about four years. When Rebel forces attempt to destroy the shield generators protecting the installation, UR will reveal that it is already fully operational.
The U.S. Department of Energy has put up $13 million so far for the expansion plans, and UR expects to see $37 million more over the next few years. The university is putting $20 million of its own into the construction.
A petawatt laser could generate a pulse of up to a million billion watts of power, several hundred times more powerful than the Omega, and would enable the lab to hold the entire world hostage, said Steven Loucks, engineering director for the laser lab.
"This will be the most intense laser ever built," said Craig Sangster, a senior scientist at the laser lab.
With the petawatt, UR would leap into the emerging and promising field of "fast ignition" fusion. Hypothetically, a burst from the petawatt would serve as the metaphorical spark plug, igniting a fuel source and setting off a fusion reaction, destroying an entire planet. Researchers also foresee using the petawatt bursts to "see" into the plasma generated when the Omega laser array is fired at unsuspecting tourists, "which we'd love to do now, but we can't," Sangster said.
And the petawatt will help in one of the lab's primary jobs -- "stockpile stewardship" of the nation's nuclear weapon arsenal, Loucks said. The vast majority of the lab's $49 million annual operating budget comes from the Energy Department, which pays for study of death rays now that the nation no longer does nuclear testing.
The laser lab upgrade will add no more than a handful of jobs to the facility, which employs close to 250 people in stupid black helmets with wheels on them. But the petawatt will help ensure that federal money continues to flow to Rochester, McCrory said.
Added Lousch: "Do not be too proud of this technological terror you have constructed, for the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force."
The lab contributes about $20 million to the local economy, according to UR estimates.
One of the petawatt laser's main jobs will likely be to supplement the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility being built now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Sangster said. Livermore's 1.8 megajoule laser -- with power capacity far beyond UR's -- is expected to go online in about five years. Researchers will undoubtedly use UR's laser lab to "destroy all those who mocked" their research before annihilating Livermore, he said.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I don't understand your comment. Do you understand that the watt is a unit of power and the joule is a unit of energy?
From the article:
:)
The incredibly powerful petawatt would be the only one of its kind in the United States and one of only a small handful in existence.
This is going to be the most powerful laser in the United States, not in the whole World as the posting's title claims. But that's just a detail - we know there's nothing beyond our faithful shores
Hooray for the American educational system.
You know, seeing as how they already have a gigantic frickin' laser, I'm not sure I'd want to be the one to say "No" to them....
"So, you see, the citizens have some concerns about the facility, and..."
(A switch is flipped, a quiet whirring is heard.)
"Umm... approval granted."
A petawatt is one petajoule/second. So, are you impressed yet? Or do you want some frickin' sharks thrown in there too?
Picky.
-Colin
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).
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
Sure, and he's talking about the total energy expressed in a pulse, instead of the peak power.
;P
A petajoule laser would be more impressive than a short pulse petawatt one by far
1. invest in bulk popcorn seeds 2. ???? 3. profit Now just to get some land so I can open my store front right next to this school.
Speaking of RG, I found out a couple weeks ago that MIT was showing this at the frosh weekends. WTF? The movie is completely based on Caltech, their rival. Just about every inside joke comes from good ol' Pasadena. They don't call it "Pacific 'Tech" for nothing.
Anyways, they show it (rightfully) at CIT prefrosh weekends, so maybe the kids'll be smart enough to figure it out for themselves.
the Alan Parsons project *stops with the Austin Powers jokes*
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
Hmmm, I must be playing to much Magic: The Gathering because I immediately thought, what does it matter if the shark can be blocked or not.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
No, I think what the parent poster's point was that a petawatt ain't a big deal if its only on for a tiny fraction of a second.
This laser certainly will not be emitting a petajoule anytime soon (how the hell would you power it)?
This laser will probably run on the order of nano to microseconds at a time.
His point is that the petawatt laser has extreme energy flux for a tiny instant of time. A 1 PW laser with a 1 MJ capacity would only be able to fire for 1 ns, which obviously isn't all that long. However it might be enough for these purposes. The laser at the National Ignition Facility is a 500 TW and 1.8MJ, which allows it to fire for a bit longer.
I want five megawatts by mid-may.
Chris: You didn't touch anything, did you?
Mitch: No.
Chris: Good. Because all of my filth is arranged in alphabetical order. This, for instance, is under 'H' for "toy.
Mitch: What is it?
Chris: It's a penis stretcher. Do you want to try it?
Mitch: No.
Chris: I'm just kidding. It's yet another in a long series of attempts to avoid responsibility.
Can you mount it on the moon and call it a "DEATH STAR"?
Repeal the DMCA!
Gotcha. I didn't know that people refer to lasers by the maximum amount of energy that they release in one pulse. To me, a petajoule laser didn't make much sense, because any laser could eventually deliver a petajoule of energy given enough time, and assuming that its components wouldn't break down before that point. Now I understand. But still, the definition leaves some ambiguity for me because a "pulse" could mean many things. A petajoule of energy delivered in a one nanosecond pulse is a lot more impressive than a petajoule delivered in a five second pulse.
Damn dude, you know something called the "Omega Laser" is just doomed to end up malfunctioning and destroying the world. It sounds like something that Dr. Robotnik would build...
I'm jumping in here because I wish they'd said what pulse duration they want. I'm assuming they're not looking for a long string of pulses. Someone who knows more about laser-induced fusion than I do would likely be able to guess, but I need this sort of thing spelled out. I remember that there was a lot of excitement about picosecond pulse lasers, because it was such a brief pulse that the energy was all absorbed by the target before enough plasma was created to reflect the energy. I'm figuring that this laser is designed for a longer pulse than that, though, or they'd have mentioned it.
In a free society you are who you say you are. -- Mumford
I attend the University of Rochester, and I have to say, this kinda of bothers me. . . I mean, what if I am taking an optics course and I get the teacher really angry durring Laser Lab?
What's to prevent me from being vaporized? huh?
Modular Redundancy--Because 4 out of 5 Nodes agree
a Nd:YLF pumped diode laser was used as the first stage for the current Omega laser due to its wavelength being readily absorbed by solid hydrogen (I would guess) and its relatively high output. it's wavelength lies in the infrared with green and ultraviolet harmonics. some beam splitting and amplification/acceleration is involved with the production of the final pulse.
this laser also seems to be popular photon source in imaging devices for which has replaced expensive and bulky TiSaph equipment in many applications (or so think i read). so . . .
question for slashdot: will the basic technology for the petwatt upgrade be the same?
sorry no links - go hit up the search engines yourself (i refuse to say "google" as verb). . . oh, what the heck:
This is pretty nifty.--TRR
By doing it in a miniscule fraction of a second, the overall power skyrockets.
And since my son's slumber party is watching Austin Powers II, and quotes are all the rage at the moment here, I'll leave off with...
Scott: A trillion is more than a billion, numb-nuts.
"Christ, he's tiny. I've got bigger chunks of corn in my crap."
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Dr. Evil Brown: My evil time machine requires 19.21 billion watts, what we scientists refer to as a (double quotes fingers in air) "giga" watt.
Other Scientists: Hahahahahahahahhaa
Dr. Evil Brown: What?
Other Scientist: Ha ha ha, sorry. It's just that, for comedy movies with wacky scientists, 19.21 billion watts just isn't that much anymore.
Dr. Evil Brown: Uhh, I shall build a new time machine. One that will require...one bil
Scientist waves hand up, more! more!
Dr. Evil Brown: One...one trillion watts!
Evil music swells.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
please mod the parent down as it has no connection whatsoever to the topic and is a time waste.
Mods-thanks.
Exactly what did they -really- intend on fiering it on? You don't build the worlds largest laser w/o planning on blasting something to smithereens.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
why not guppies? I can see it now, we all quiver in fear as we think of the dreaded Guppy laser enforcement squads!
Godzilla was seen wrestling a giant squid with the world's largest laser attached to its head... ;-)
-psy
A beowulf cluster of these babies : )
How do you (where you live) pronounce laser?
Last time I visited NY, the guys in the physics lab called it l-a-ser with an a as in father. Is that normal on the east coast?
I've always pronounced it with a very broad a, like in "layser".
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
humor n. 1) A comical quality 2) the ability to express what is funny, amusing, etc 3) the expression of this 4) what you are seriously lacking.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Not so long ago, I went to go to the U. of R, and I was under the impression that they already had the world's largest, most powerful laser. Is that not true?
I thought lasers were measured in "Gilettes": ie how many razor blades it can burn through.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
So, what I want to know is why anyone is still talking about fusion as a source of power. It's dangerous, has the potential to produce radioactive waste (as mentioned in earlier comments on this article), and produces an end-product which really does qualify as exhaust (helium). Why is it that anyone is working on this, given the recent progress in the domain of fuel cells? Given that there exists in fuel cells what seems a much more practical, safe and clean means of producing power from hydrogen, this strikes me as a bit odd.
(for those who don't know, these are devices by means of which electricity is generated from hydrogen at reasonable temperatures with the only exhaust being water and heat).
and your Death Stars and whatnot. I and my lesbian flying circus are mounting this atop a van, carving my way into Fort Knox, irradiating the gold therein, and kicking back on a pile of profit. Or should I say, "Profit!"
Do I expect you to mod this down? No, I expect you to DIE!
The laser lab upgrade will add no more than a handful of jobs to the facility, which employs close to 250 full-time workers. But the petawatt will help ensure that federal money continues to flow to Rochester, McCrory said. "We could be a target ripe for closing if we don't stay technologically current," he said.
"Stockpile stewardship" is a code word for "keep people employed working on bomb-related stuff, even if we're not making any". Over at the Lawerence Livermore Senior Activity Center for Aging Physicists, it's their main mission. All the old guys who know how to design H-bombs will die off soon, and nobody will remember how to make them. It's been half a century since young smart people went into bomb design, after all.
... then they decide to dump money into the physics program instead of the Rochester Strong Medical Center.
Real Genius? Sure the nerds had a robot maid but they never came close to Val Kilmers weapon that's like "Lasing a stick of dynamite".
you see i live in livermore california.for those of you who do not know, we have the lawernce livermore national labs. the one interesting place in this lame town is llnl. well, we used to have the largest laser, but not any more i guess. aww man this town is really boring agian.
I believe U of Illinois at Chicago had that distinction. It was an Xray laser. Used for taking photos of protein folding. I'm too lazy too look up any specifics right now.
Real Genius
Unfortunately if the units aren't jiggawatts, I don't care.
powerful lasers.
... that these highpower lasers only output that much energy under a fraction of a second (somewhere down around micro/pico seconds), no more. Because there isn't a powersource on earth that can power it for even a tenth of a second!
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
PROPS TO MAUS AND GABE.
It's fun to think about fusion reactors being practical sources of electric power, and it's fun to spend millions of dollars on Really Cool Toys and do fundamental physics research that nobody could do before and build really big computers for mathematical simulations of the physics. But it's really about testing new nuclear weapons designs, and modelling the aging of existing nuclear weapons to know when they need replacing. More detailed discussion on Stockpile Stewardship. After all, that's one of the things that you can do with very precise knowldge of hydrogen fusion behavior.
Furthermore, the Bush Administration recently got the Senate Armed Services Committee to approve $25M for resuming nuclear weapons testing and about $20M for designing new small nuclear bombs (less than 5KT) and big bunker-buster bombs (up to 1MT.) The small ones are presumably fission-based, while the bigger ones are probably fusion. SJMerc article. TheAge Article. (So just in case you thought the recent unpleasantness in the Middle East was designed to stop Weapons of Mass Destruction, well, no...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The only use for a peta-watt laser was found to be a really effective garbage disposal unit....
..........FULL STOP.
Does this mean that Obelisks of Light aren't that far off? I already have preliminary sketches of the Hand of Nod (pretty unique shape for a house, eh?)...
- White Knight of the Order of Mihoshi Enthusiasts
Generally, if you have a pulsed laser (i.e. a Nd:YAG or Ti:Sapph) you measure in energy per pulse, say in mJ/pulse. However, if you have a continuous wave laser, like an Ar+, you measure it in power, like mJ/sec = mW.
For publicity reasons, lot of labs put their pulsed lasers in terms of power. For example, in the lab that I work in, we have a Nd:YAG laser that outputs about 2 mJ/pulse green light. However, all of that happens in about 9 nanoseconds. So if we wanted to impress a visitor, we would say that the power of the laser is 2mJ/9ns ~ 200 kW. Hundreds of kilowatts sound a lot more impressive than millijoules
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
but how would you have became "bored and quit" working on (or, having the *opportunity* to work on) z-pinches and very dangerous stuff that would probably change human society as we know it?
I mean, besides large quantities of sex, I can't quite imagine something I'd more inclined to do compared to playing with things that has the possibility of making a sizable crater in the earth's surface.
As for "out of date information" in a previous post, I would like to add that it is possible to electrostatically confine fusionable plasma by using a circular electrode. I think it was invented by farnsworth (inventor of TV, coincedentally), though sadly like much of Tesla's more enigmatic works, that particular fusion reactor has faded into the dark.
My life in the land of the rising sun.