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.

Comments

all these strange figures

[howlingmadhowie]

20 billion trillion watt per square centimeter = 2x10^26 Wm^-2
300 terawatt of power = 3x10^14 W
1.3 micron wide = ca. 1.7x10^-12 m^2 (for a square shape)
30 femtosecond = 3x10^-14 s

hope that clarifies things.

FS-Lasers are cool beasts

[imsabbel]

Because focussed correctly, the extremely high field strenght in the focal point can create effects that at first seem physically implausible.

For example there is one effect that seems to "break" quantum phyiscs (or more exactly, the photo-effect): You can excite electrons out of energy levels that are bound stronger than the photon energy. Even if they are bound _a_ lot stronger. The electric fields can be strong enough to strip atoms from everything down to and including the k-shell (I have one seen a presenter show a silde mentioning 37-photon effects...)
This can be used to create hard x-rays, or, of course, as a particle accelerator: You can GeV on ion energyies from them with a relatively simple setup.

This is of course for "normal" FS-Lasers, wich fill not much more than a large optical bank. But something tells me that _this_ one can make even more intersting stuff happen :)

... and that amounts to

[ebcdic]

... 9 Joules delivered in each pulse, one every 10 seconds. Giving an average power of about 1 Watt. Ideal for taking over very small universes.