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
"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.
Then we will send the landwalking sharks with the attached lasers to destroy PETA. 2 birds, one stone.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
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...
Time to count the number of austin powers posts...
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
A watt is a unit of power, not energy.
This laser (I can tell you without reading the article, as the laws of physics prevent the presumption) is only on for an EXTREMELY short duration, probably on the order of billionths of a second (that's 10E-9, for UK readers).
A peta-joule (as someone else pointed out) would be a LOT of coal. A petawatt for an extremely short duration isn't that much energy. Probably less than the entire university consumes for 1 second (I don't have accurate numbers on their power consumption, so don't micro analyze this statement).
The only use for such a short duration but high power laser is in physics experiments, and typically involves only a few dollars of electricity, so nearly no appreciable amount of coal or waste of any kind.
I'll pass on the political discussion though.
but how the hell can they harness that
In a word, magnets. The idea behind fusion, essentially, is that you raise a (hydrogen) plasma to sufficient temperature and pressure, and it will undergo fusion. If you get the conditions just right, it'll then continue to fuse once you've ignited it, thus supplying you with energy.
What you may not appreciate is that a plasma is electrically charged, and can therefore be contained using a suitable magnetic field. Arguably the most promising containment setup at the moment is the tokamak (from the Russian for bottle, iirc), which is a torus-shaped machine. Electromagnets around the torus create a circular magnetic field, which keeps the plasma contained in a ring. (My apologies if my information is out of date, I quit my PhD in plasma physics 4 years ago...)
Despite what the article says, however, fusion is not entirely pollution-free. One of the byproducts is a fairly large supply of neutrons. These neutrons are absorbed by the reactor, which will slowly but surely become radioactive. Therefore, you will eventually be left with radioactive waste to dispose of. You won't get anything like the quantity you get with fission, though, and fusion certainly doesn't produce any "conventional" pollution.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
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
Indeed.
:-)
A few years ago, I started a PhD in plasma physics, studying the high speed electron transport effects in short pulse, high intensity laser-plasma interactions. You are of course quite correct in your assertion that this sort of laser fires extremely brief pulses.
In plamsa physics, such a pulse is used to rapidly (read, near-instanteously) heat the surface of a target. The rapid heating causes the surface to ablate, which in turn causes the rest of the target to be compressed and heated. Get it right, and fusion ocurrs.
Quite apart from the physical reasons why you'd use a short pulse, the ultimate goal here is to create a viable method of producing energy. The more energy you put in at the start (by using a "long" laser pulse), the more you have to get out in the long run to make it worthwhile.
When I was still on my PhD (before I got bored and quit), we had a working z-pinch in the basement. As dramatic as it would have been for the lights to dim, there were no outward signs when it was fired
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I think they plan on dealing with this by using vanadium alloys. If you start with the most stable form of vanadium (V51) and bombard it with neutrons, the first neutron absorbed will cause a quick beta decay to Cr52. Fortunately, chromium has the same crystal structure as V, so you won't weaken the alloy much. Cr can absorb another 3 neutrons before it beta-decays to Mn55, which has a different crystal structure, so at that point, you might start causing enbrittlement of the alloy. However, Mn55 can absorb 5 more neutrons before you end up with an element that has a worrying half life (Co60).
So by picking your materials correctly, you can potentially avoid some of the problems associated with neutrons.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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?
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
"My apologies if my information is out of date, I quit my PhD in plasma physics 4 years ago..."
That's still more recent than the last time I did plasma physics... which was never.
"...fusion certainly doesn't produce any "conventional" pollution."
You mean like cows? Good. One nuclear fart and we're all goners.
They aren't low power. There are 60 beams on the laser with an average Omega beam being around 30cm in diameter and assuming 1TW pulse/beam you would be exposed to several Gigawatts per square cm. Im guessing now, but I would think if you were exposed to the infrared beam(before it gets converted to UV) you would be very severely burned but if you were hit with the UV side it might not be so bad since it is so readily absorbed by the upper layer of your skin it might just blow off a few top layers. I definitly would not want to try it though, there are scary looking burn marks all over the laser target chamber and walls of the containment room.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"