Slashdot Mirror
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.
Will this laser have to be attached to significantly more powerful sharks?
I am holding out for Laser Eye Implants.
(Just don't go glaring at yourself in the mirror...)
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
It'll never work. There's just no peta tonne shark to put it on.
http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~utlasers/texas_petawatt_files/texas_petawatt.htm
with fotos and shematics, etc..
Can it levitate a squirrel?
During a tenth of a femtosecond this laser is ... brighter than sunlight on the surface of the Sun
That is 10 to the power of -16 of a second. Such comparisons are ridiculous because even I can say my torch is brighter than the sunlight on the surface of the sun for 1 gazillionth of a second. :P
FTFA: "They will create mini-supernovas."
the Fools! the Fools! what could possibly go wrong? Actually I'm not so worried about a mini supernova as I am a mini black hole, because I don't see a mini supervova as possibly self sustaining (might take out a few scientists though - there's always plenty more), whilst a mini black whole near a large mass might last long enough to eat us all. Still, a better way to go then the grey goo.
Because a big freaking laser is interesting? Jeez, lay off the America-bashing for a while - it's unhealthy to fixate on such things. It's odd that the first thing that you thought of was how Americans suck and how Europeans are so great with their LHC. What do we call that, "projection"? This laser has got nothing to do with the LHC, which I am also excited to see.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"It's odd that the first thing that you thought of was how Americans suck and how Europeans are so great with their LHC."
Those are your words, not his.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
the laser elevator may become true!
:)
http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/02/15/the-laser-elevator/
let's lift some squirrels
Am I the only one thinking about "Real Genius"? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
Lets get ready to cook some popcorn!
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
I am the greatest lover that ever lived.
But seriously,I have been electrocuted by 20,000V at significant current several times. But only for a few hundred nanoseconds at a time. Sparks plugs rock.
How do I RepRap one of those?
I'm not bashing America, but this seems like a local story in science not a global one. By the end of this year we may have found the Higgs Boson, which is a big story.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Our Sun puts out about 4 x 10^24 watts, continuously, for billions of years.
So this laser is only putting out about one four-billionth of the Sun, and only for a very split second.
It's also very misleading if they intended to compare brightness per unit area. Even a cheap laser pointer is brighter than the surface of the Sun.
You must work for Verizon.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
The pulse length is ~100 fs (0.1 ps), not 0.1 fs. 100 fs is already about as short as laser pulses can get - and 0.1 fs is much shorter than the length of a single electromagnetic wave.
Now to put it on a F***ing sharks heads
One femtoseocnd is 10 to the power of -15 of a second,NOT one trillionth of a second.Thus the pulse duration should be 100 fs,which is realistic.State of the art technology can't yet produce high power sub-femtosecond(i.e attosecond) pulses ,due to low conversion efficiency of energy concentrated on the low-frequency spectrum to the high-frequency spectrum using currently available methods(for an attosecond pulse a Fourier Transform will show that you have mostly X-ray frequency components in the frequency spectrum).
Discaimer:I'm a Ph.D student working on high-power laser systems.
And what exactly powers it? Oh wait coal.
when I read the title I thought it was about a slasher movie
University of Rochester is building a petawatt laser of capable of picosecond pulse lengths. http://omegaep.lle.rochester.edu/
"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" - Doctor Who
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's a big laser beam. Of course it's news for nerds. If the LHC works, great, but that's just one story. Instead of moaning about how provincial it is, how about going to the site and reading the specs of that thing?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Petawatt Lasers use, wait for this, petawatts of power.
Yes, peta watts (10 ^ 15) for less than a femto (10 ^ -15) second)
A mere blip compared to other power uses. I don't think this research is particularly relevant to climate change, the OP was trying to start a flamewar.
How you think that power is generated? Nice clean nuclear? Hahahaha.
Probably natural gas. And carbon-neutral is a better way to describe nuclear than clean.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Nope. The key ring laser pointers are 1mW to 5mW so this thing is 2000 to 10000 times the average power. A 10W laser is very good at setting fire to things but won't drill a hole through your still twitching body.
wot no sig
Oh goodie! Now in a couple of years, when they figure out a way to make a laser pointer out of this, we can have these burning holes in everything LOL.
I guess this is time to repost that story about the billion-watt light bulb.
http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/humor/billion-watt-light-bulb
Now I have a way to make some giant Texas Toast, or as it is called, Texas Petatoast.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Now featuring upcoming horror flick The Texas Petawatt Laser Massacre
To be honest, its hard to get excited about this with the LHC coming online soon.
True, what's the most this laser could do, cut the Earth in half? Pretty tame compared with the LHC recreating the Big Bang and destroying the universe as we know it.
You have to put this in perspective. They may have made a laser with highest peak intensities but it's nowhere near the most energetic laser out there. According to their press release their pulses have 150 J of energy. Compare this to the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore laser, which will produce 1.8 MJ per shot when it is completed next year, or to the laser at the University of Rochester, which will produce several kJ. Though not yet finished, both these lasers have already demonstrated many kJ of energies.
George Lucas sues the University of Texas for copyright infringement.
Quote: "-They have clearly turned the earth into a Death Star. And, it just so happens, I've got it registered!"
I guess this means the saying that "everything is bigger in Texas"* must be true. *except for microchips, which in Texas are in fact smaller.
It's interesting to note that this laser actually uses one of the original diffraction gratings from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's petawatt laser, which was later dismantled as mentioned in the blog post.
More Roland the Plogger blogspam, driving traffic to his useless ad-laden blog. To get around the block on links to his own site, he's now submitting links disguised via "tinyurl".
Slashdot covered this laser weeks ago.
They have a freshman wonder kid and a graduating senior working together on breakthrough laser designs.
The interesting thing is the LHC is actually getting cooler as every day goes by.
your new Texan Petawatt Laser Overlords.
The article's not quite right; funding came from revenue generated by the football program, and we've currently got it aimed at Norman, Oklahoma
Rest assured that while the gateways this device creates have been certified safe for human travel, the device itself has not... Do not touch the operational end of the device..Do not look into the operational end of the device. Do not submerge the device in liquid, even partially...
Remember, it's not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you...
I'm more excited at possible practical implications. LHC, may provides evidence to support theory. Petawatt laser, brighter than our sun, very little heat, possible uses in generating energy. Kind of hard not to get excited about the laser, even if it were built in europe.
That's approximately one sextillion photons per firing.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Imagine a myriad of monkeys randomly typing, posting the entire works of Shakespeare...
10W lasers are frequently used for engraving in metals and will, if left on long enough burn a hole through steel. While it may take a while, and your body will no longer be twitching, it can and will eventually burn a hole through a human body. The grandparent of your post is wrong about the "heat thing" is also wrong. You have to use the instantaneous power. While the explosive power of firecrackers exploded 1 per second is small, one firecracker explosion is enough to do serious harm to a finger. If any of you think this petawatt laser isn't producing significant energy output, I dare any of you to stick your finger in it's path. I guarantee, you'll lose some flesh and bone.
BTW, surgical lasers are generally in the range of 3-100W and a 30 watt laser will rapidly burn a hole completely through your hand, and you won't even know it happens until it's done. It will be quite painless. Maybe some residual heat, or a reaction from a nerve after the fact. And a 5mW Laser will easily burn through your retina, depending on the wavelength of the laser. Of course a single look in a 5mW laser will leave a very small bindspot, unless you keep it on your eye looking at it from lots of angles.
Naturally there is a difference between pulsed and continuous beam lasers, and this petawatt laser is not a continuous beam. There are no continuous beam lasers in this region of energy output, because nothing could hold up to the continuous heat produced by one.
I wonder what the punch line should be for, "How many sharks does it take to carry the The Texas Petawatt laser so they can enslave the free world"?
When I glanced over the summary, I thought that said a petawatt taser.
Thought to myself...ouch.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
The answer to that would be "Do not look at laser with remaining head."
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Back in the 1970s, when lasers were shiny "new" tech, they would demonstrate them by burning holes in razor blades. This prompted the "Gilette" as a unit of measure for lasers, ie how many razor blades could the laser burn through per pulse. I say it's time to revive this measure.
So the question arises, is the power delivered to the razor blade be enought to burn a hole through it, or will the shortness of the pulse mean that there's not enough time to do anything but vapourize a few of the surface atoms? In short, how many Gilettes is this laser?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"Don't Lase me, Bro!"
Fixed it for you.
Petawatt Lasers use, wait for this, petawatts of power. How you think that power is generated? Nice clean nuclear?
Power is "change in energy divided by time." So there are two reasons why power could be an enormous number -- 1, the change in energy could be huge, or 2, the time is incredibly short. In this case, it's the latter. Yes, the number comes out to be "petawatts." Yes, it's correct. No, that doesn't mean they need a nuclear reactor to produce the energy, as the actual amount of energy is really very small.
you could have one hell of a lasercat
I believe the other reply to your comment was regarding the irony of you discussing power without understanding the definition of power. Power is an instantaneous measurement, what you are comparing is energy (Power x Time) or AVERAGE power (Power x Duty Factor). I haven't RTFA, but I will believe an earlier post which said the AVERAGE power is about 10 Watts. A "AA" battery delivering 10 Watts of power could do so for ~ 13 minutes (assuming 1.5 V, 1500 mAh); however, this assumes a AA battery is capable of delivering 6.6 Amps of current, which I suspect isn't likely (though I don't know the internal resistance of a "AA" battery).
They use a ZPM to power it.
That diagram looks a little like something I scribbled when I was 2. I was genius then too. ;-)
Is there anything that explains it?
How long before they start killing the falsely accused with this laser?
the problem with this is that you are assuming that the laser is 100% efficient - which i'm sure it's not. So the power needed would be three to four orders higher than the power delivered by the laser.
It was a joke.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
So the power needed would be three to four orders higher
OMG! Three to four orders higher!!!!!!!
Shit, what? We're talking about... what? Hundreds of watts? Thousands?
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!!1!@
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
So was mine. Specifically, I was alluding to the well-reported issue they had with discerning the difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.