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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.
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?
even I can say my torch is brighter than the sunlight on the surface of the sun for 1 gazillionth of a second.
You could say it, but it wouldn't be true.
sudo ergo sum
"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."
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.
However, your right be concerned about the potential bouts of uncontrollable fusion/fission and thier scientist vaporizing shockwaves.
The mini black holes aren't a worry. It's when they become large enough to devour scientists, and thier space/time warping event horizons encroach on your personal boundaries, then you should worry.
Grey goo? Seriously, you're a human. We replicate out of control consuming any natural resources we can get our hands on. We're just not really efficient grey goo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They aren't ridiculous - and you are ill informed to say that they are. Average power vs. peak power. Those two variables are highly relevent for a pulsed laser. Your "torch" isn't even pulsed.
A lot of ground breaking research is undertaken *utilising* the ability to deliver very short very high energy pulses - for doing that you can deliver a huge amount of energy in a very tiny amount of time - then observe what happens. Indeed a lot of the very high energy regions cannot be accessed with anything but ultrafast pulsed systems, as CW setups would just destroy themselves (and even using UF systems chirping "tricks" are used to reduce peak powers until the final moment to ensure the optics aren't burnt out).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirped_pulse_amplification
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
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.
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.
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.
"Don't Lase me, Bro!"
Fixed it for you.