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The Texas Petawatt Laser
Roland Piquepaille notes the hype surrounding what the University of Texas at Austin is calling the world's most powerful laser. During a tenth of a femtosecond this laser is 2,000 times more powerful than all the power plants in the US, and is brighter than sunlight on the surface of the Sun. On his own blog Roland points out that UT's is not the first petawatt laser; that distinction belongs to a system installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1996.
Wouldn't firing this laser anywhere causally connected with the known universe make earth's water uncomfortably hot? Where do they get the power to run this thing anyway? Do they just jack into all of the power plants in the US for 200 femtoseconds and then release it all in a tenth of a femtosecond? And how does it make sense to refer to the generating capacity of all the power plants the US in terms of energy? There are no times, femtosecond or not, involved, watts are rates of energy consumption.
To be fair, a 5mW laser point would need to be focused to a diameter of ~10 microns to reach the sun's surface intensity of ~6kW/cm^2.
And a cheap laser pointer can't be focused to that size.
But of course you're right. They're just going for the unwashed public wow factor.
It looks like this. Pictures like that bring a tear to my eye. If you have even a small subset of those capacitors, you can do some seriously cool shit.
In case this was a serious question: Giant capacitors, connected in parallel.
... from a bazillion disposable cameras.