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?
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?
It's all good, so long as you remember to shout "BEHOLD! OPTIC BLAST!" before doing it.
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
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...
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.
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
WARNING: Do not look directly into laser with remaining eye.
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
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.
"Don't Lase me, Bro!"
Fixed it for you.