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U of MI Produces Strongest Laser Ever
eldavojohn writes "Weighing in at a mere 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter and containing a measly 300 terawatts of power, the University of Michigan has broken a record with a 1.3-micron speck wide laser. It's about two orders of magnitude higher than any other laser in the world and can perform for 30 femtoseconds once every ten seconds — some of the researchers speculate it is the most powerful laser in the universe. 'If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory ... To achieve this beam, the research team added another amplifier to the HERCULES laser system, which previously operated at 50 terawatts. HERCULES is a titanium-sapphire laser that takes up several rooms at U-M's Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. Light fed into it bounces like a pinball off a series of mirrors and other optical elements. It gets stretched, energized, squeezed and focused along the way.'" And ... cue the evil chortling.
Now if you can get it to fit in the weapons bay of a B1-B we might have something.
That's nothing! I can perform for 3 seconds once every ten minutes!
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
...it's a gigantic spherical shark?
Student: What are we going to do with this immensely powerful laser, professor? :D
Professor: We shall commence "Phase 2", we shall place the "la-ser" on something called "the moon"
Student: And then we can hold the world ransom for a horrendously large amount of money
Professor: Hell no! We're going to wipe all other universities off the face of the Earth!
For very large values of shark.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."