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."

Comments

National Ignition Facility, Livermore

[NetDrain]

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.

Close to me

[saabmp3]

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

Re:Already the most powerful UV laser at UR

[deglr6328]

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?