World's Newest, Most Powerful Laser Comes Online

deglr6328 writes "The OMEGA EP laser at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics was dedicated today at the Robert L. Sproull Center for Ultra High Intensity Laser Research. The new laser, which has been in design since ~2002 will, at 1 kilojoule per 1 picosecond pulse, be the highest energy petawatt-scale laser ever created by far. For a fleeting fraction of a second, it will deliver a beam of infrared light at 1054 nm that is more powerful than the total energy consumption of all human activity on the planet, to a tiny spot the size of the head of a pin. Previous petawatt scale lasers such as the one created at Lawrence Livermore labs in the late '90s and (dismantled in 1999) were capable of only several hundred joules per pulse. The new OMEGA EP laser will be able to manifest power densities sufficient to examine Unruh and Hawking radiation-like phenomena in the laboratory and will have the capability to directly produce nuclear reactions through ultra high electric field initiated photodisintegration."

Comments

And once again science reporters gets it all wrong

[flajann]

"The new laser, which has been in design since ~2002 will, at 1 kilojoule per 1 picosecond pulse, be the highest energy petawatt scale laser ever created by far. For a fleeting fraction of a second, it will deliver a beam of infrared light at 1054 nm that is more powerful than the total energy consumption of all human activity on the planet,"

More powerful than the total ENERGY consumption of all the human activity on the planet? It's only one kilojoule. It would be much more accuracte to say that the POWER output for a picosecond would be greater than the combined POWER consumption of the entire planet.

But that raises another question: Do most people understand the difference between ENERGY and POWER, anyway? the two words seem to be used almost interchangabily by your average Joe.

The most intense is a UK Laser.

[Nowhere.Men]

The Central Laser Facility in the UK has a laser Astra-Gemini that will produce a greater intensity on target. It is a dual beam laser with a repetiton rate of 3 shots per minutes.

The building to house this laser is like a small house but with a shielded room for the target area.

- Astra- Gemini : 15 J on target in 30 fs : Single Beam Intensity to 10^22 W/cm2.

- OMEGA EP : 1 kJ in 1 ps; on-target intensities of greater than 2 x 10^20 W/cm2.

the pico second ignition should be called slow ignition compared with 30 femtosecond.

Re:And once again science reporters gets it all wr

[mangu]

isn't Power Energy per Time, thus Power output for a picosecond is Energy per Time per picosecond?

You're right in that power is energy per time, in this case the energy is one kilojoule and the time is one picosecond, so the power is one kilojoule per picosecond.

What the GP means is that, during that interval of one picosecond, the thing is emitting more power than is being consumed by all the planet. The total energy emitted by the laser pulse is that power multiplied by one picosecond, and the result of this multiplication is one kilojoule.

An interesting bit of information here is a round figure for the power consumption of all humanity: one kilojoule per picosecond. To get the equivalent in kilowatts, multiply one kilojoule by 1000000000000, because a kilowatt is one kilojoule per second.