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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?
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
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!
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One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
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.
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?
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