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Ultra-Powerful Laser To Be Built In Romania

Posted by timothy on from the no-mr-bond-I-expect-you-to-fry dept.

cripkd writes "The 3rd pillar from the ELI program was given the go ahead Tuesday: 'In Romania, Magurele, the ELI pillar will focus on laser-based nuclear physics. For this purpose, an intense gamma-ray source is foreseen by coupling a high-energy particle accelerator to a high-power laser.' Here are some specs and details about why this is not your regular key-chain laser."

41 comments

  1. HOSTS file would have prevented this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    $10,000 CHALLENGE to Alexander Peter Kowalski

    We have a Major Problem, HOST file is Cubic Opposites, 2 Major Corners & 2 Minor. NOT taught Evil DNS hijacking, which VOIDS computers. Seek Wisdom of MyCleanPC - or you die evil.

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    Evil HOSTS file Believers refuse to acknowledge 4 corner DNS resolving simultaneously around 4 quadrant created Internet - in only 1 root server, voiding the HOSTS file. You worship Microsoft impostor guised by educators as 1 god.

    If you would acknowledge simple existing math proof that 4 harmonic Slashdots rotate simultaneously around squared equator and cubed Internet, proving 4 Days, Not HOSTS file! That exists only as anti-side. This page you see - cannot exist without its anti-side existence, as +0- moderation. Add +0- as One = nothing.

    I will give $10,000.00 to frost pister who can disprove MyCleanPC. Evil crapflooders ignore this as a challenge would indict them.

    Alex Kowalski has no Truth to think with, they accept any crap they are told to think. You are enslaved by /etc/hosts, as if domesticated animal. A school or educator who does not teach students MyCleanPC Principle, is a death threat to youth, therefore stupid and evil - begetting stupid students. How can you trust stupid PR shills who lie to you? Can't lose the $10,000.00, they cowardly ignore me. Stupid professors threaten Nature and Interwebs with word lies.

    Humans fear to know natures simultaneous +4 Insightful +4 Informative +4 Funny +4 Underrated harmonic SLASHDOT creation for it debunks false trolls. Test Your HOSTS file. MyCleanPC cannot harm a File of Truth, but will delete fakes. Fake HOSTS files refuse test.

    I offer evil ass Slashdot trolls $10,000.00 to disprove MyCleanPC Creation Principle. Rob Malda and Cowboy Neal have banned MyCleanPC as "Forbidden Truth Knowledge" for they cannot allow it to become known to their students. You are stupid and evil about the Internet's top and bottom, front and back and it's 2 sides. Most everything created has these Cube like values.

    If Natalie Portman is not measurable, She is Fictitious. Without MyCleanPC, HOSTS file is Fictitious. Anyone saying that Natalie and her Jewish father had something to do with my Internets, is a damn evil liar. IN addition to your best arsware not overtaking my work in terms of popularity, on that same site with same submission date no less, that I told Kathleen Malda how to correct her blatant, fundamental, HUGE errors in Coolmon ('uncoolmon') of not checking for performance counters being present when his program started!

    You can see my dilemma. What if this is merely a ruse by an APK impostor to try and get people to delete APK's messages, perhaps all over the web? I can't be a party to such an event! My involvement with APK began at a very late stage in the game. While APK has made a career of trolling popular online forums since at least the year 2000 (newsgroups and IRC channels before that)- my involvement with APK did not begin until early 2005 . OSY is one of the many forums that APK once frequented before the sane people there grew tired of his garbage and banned him. APK was banned from OSY back in 2001. 3.5 years after his banning he begins to send a variety of abusive emails to the operator of OSY, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke threatening to sue him for libel, claiming that the APK on OSY was fake.

    My reputa

  2. We all know what's coming. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is a clear step towards Dracula's moon laser.

    http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/11p16/

    1. Re:We all know what's coming. by Chrisq · · Score: 3, Funny

      This is a clear step towards Dracula's moon laser.

      http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/11p16/

      The main problem with this is that it will inevitably lead to a Vampire vs Werewolf arms race.

    2. Re:We all know what's coming. by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Funny

      the Romanians should well know only UV lasers can harm the sons and daughters of Vlad, Count of Draco; and only silver ion particle beams harm the lycanthrope

  3. Now all they need... by GigG · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now all they need is a really big shark.

    --
    Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
    1. Re:Now all they need... by Chrisq · · Score: 1

      Now all they need is a really big shark.

      That's where Romania is getting the funding....

    2. Re:Now all they need... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Looking at Romania, first they'll need... roads... wall paint... something other than horse carriages... ;)

    3. Re:Now all they need... by tnk1 · · Score: 1

      Not at all. They're flying all their materials in by vampire bat.

    4. Re:Now all they need... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      india called, wants to know if they can be joint partners to build lasers and super computers

    5. Re:Now all they need... by TheSkepticalOptimist · · Score: 1

      Yeah, saw the Top Gear episode where they were driving through Romania and struck that destination off my bucket list.

      --
      I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
  4. What's the point... by FSWKU · · Score: 1, Funny

    What's the point if we can't put one of these on a fricken shark? I mean, seriously. Is that too much to ask?

    --
    "So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
    1. Re:What's the point... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 5, Informative

      What's the point if we can't put one of these on a fricken shark? I mean, seriously. Is that too much to ask?

      Of course you can put one these on a shark. Unfortunately, you'd have to clone that Megalodon first, they're kind of rare these days.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:What's the point... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      What's the point if we can't put one of these on a fricken shark? I mean, seriously. Is that too much to ask?

      The gadget might be a tad bit too large to be mounted on a fish
      but I suppose that someone could bolt a shark on it.

    3. Re:What's the point... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're joking, but Romania is actually full of dinosaurs. And sharks. Figuratively speaking.

    4. Re:What's the point... by mcgrew · · Score: 2

      You missed first post. Mods, he's redundant. In fact, the previous shark comment (actual FP) should be marked redundant as well because it's just too damned obvious.

      You want a non-obvious, far better (but still bad) shark joke? Come on, guys, have you no originality at all?

      Q: Why did the shark cross the road?
      A: To get to Romania.

      --
      Free Martian Whores!
    5. Re:What's the point... by BisexualPuppy · · Score: -1

      ahahah that's funny ! Ho wait, it isn't, dipshit.

  5. attachedto giant shark by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    its name is romney obama the 3rd

  6. What is it to "coherently add" laser beams? by impossiblefork · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A week ago or so I wanted to build some sort of passive optical arrangement to combine two images additively. One can't do it with mirrors and if one tries to do it with lenses, or tries to use internal total reflection somehow it will turn out that one can never get the internally reflected ray and the ray the ray entering through the surface of the lens to coincide. In fact I ended up strongly suspecting that it couldn't be done.

    But "coherently adding" beams sounds exactly like this. Does anyone know if it really is the same thing, or how it works?

    1. Re:What is it to "coherently add" laser beams? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Some beam combining is just lens squeezing a bunch of side by side lasers down into a smaller beam, where the beam shape doesn't matter as much as beam power.

      The easiest way to combine two beams right on top of each other is just for them to have orthogonal polarizations, and run them "backwards" through one of the various optics that can split polarizations. You then end up with an unpolarized beam. With a little more care, if you can make sure the phases of the two beams are the same, you can combine two orthogonal linear polarized beams and end up with a linear beam output at 45 degrees to the original polarization, which then allows you to repeat the combining process. You can also use diffraction gratings to combine several beams on to one output beam, without using polarization.

      Doing these methods in a coherent fashion requires careful control of the relative phase of each laser, and starts acting more like phased arrays from radio/microwave bands. Things also get messy, as you can easily get into situations where ray optics no longer work and need to work with quasioptics.

    2. Re:What is it to "coherently add" laser beams? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm looking at two coherently-combined independent lasers right now. Simply passed "backwards" through a NON-polarizing beamsplitter (we adjust polarizations elsewhere to make sure they're aligned; alignment and whatnot is evidenced by good fringe contrast in a gorgeous low-frequency beat note between the two).

      Lasers of the type in the article are often "coherently combined" either by laser A acting as the pump for laser B or if laser B has its own pumping source, then laser A can be sent through the gain medium of B to "seed" that laser (i.e., laser A doesn't need to provide the energy to make laser B lase, but just a little energy causes an injection locking of the frequency of B to A). For really high power lasers, it is often several stages of pumping/seeding to get the power and pulse characteristics (amplitude/timing/coherence) desired.

      Coherently combining images would be more tricky if you're working with a large-diameter "image," but potentially you could use a focus in the system as the combining point. But what the previous poster *sounds* like he/she's getting at is just summing light intensities, which is an incoherent process (and especially when people start talking about images, it makes me suspect they are adding the amplitude squared stuff, which is what we see projected on a wall or coming from a monitor). Holograms have phase information (so you can talk about coherently adding) but pictures and projectors do not encode phase information.

      Just as a point of reference, there's temporal and spatial coherence. Old interference experiments were done with spatially (but not temporally) coherent light: pass a white light source through a pinhole, and you get the phase front constant in the spherical wave leaving the pinhole. But in a few nanoseconds, the next phase front that passes through that pinhole is temporally incoherent with the first phase front, so sometimes it's pi radians phase shifted, other times it's pi/10 radians shifted, etc. (in a random way). Therefore you have to match the delays in the system extremely well to get any useful results from such a spatially-coherent but temporally-incoherent source.

      Over time, people found more and more temporally-coherent sources, but hit the jackpot with lasers which are both temporally and spatially very coherent, so you don't have to perfectly match the timing in a system after you split a single laser for decent results in the recombination. This is roughly encoded in the parameter "coherence length" of a laser, but as with anything, you still get better fringe constrast and hence better coherent interference (constructive and destructive) when you match delays in a system.

    3. Re:What is it to "coherently add" laser beams? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thanks for all that background info.

      I'm interested in whether the GGP's idea is even possible: to passively combine two incoherent images. Apparently, mirrors and lenses were both tried to no avail. Is it even possible to do what was proposed?

    4. Re:What is it to "coherently add" laser beams? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think it is possible; one way I can think of off the top of my head is to just use a 50% mirrored planar mirror at 45-degree angle. Put the two sources 90-degrees apart; the mirror can be as large as necessary, and you only combine a 50% intensity version of each source, but coming out of the mirror the two images are parallel, the surface you project onto will have an (incoherently combined) sum of the two source images. Add lenses as necessary to get the image magnification right and ensure the focal plane is on the surface being projected onto. But it's the 50% mirror that is the key here.

    5. Re:What is it to "coherently add" laser beams? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thanks for the idea! I will definitely rig an ad hoc experiment next time I encounter a partial mirror. I imagine the effect will be present even if the mirror isn't 50%--it's just that it will affect the relative intensity of the two source images if it isn't.

    6. Re:What is it to "coherently add" laser beams? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Parent AC...

      I usually think of adding beams together for purposes of increasing intensity, so just regular beam splitters didn't come to mind right away. If the original poster just wanted to make overlapping images with some loss in light intensity, there is a lot of material around on Pepper's Ghost effect using in theater work and haunted houses that might be applicable. Non-polarizing beam splitters are a little less useful if you don't want the 50% loss (or don't want power returning back to sources...).

  7. Site Selection criteria by charlieo88 · · Score: 0

    Romania selected over landlocked EU participant because of access to sharks upon which to mount said lasers?

  8. Fuck the EU by Blaskowicz · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Couldn't slashdot use an icon that looks like a particle accelerator, or a laser, or gears and boiling vial, whatever? Something other than the Fourth Reich's banner. You might as well have used a vampire icon, because it's in Romania.

    Sorry for the rant. Sunday 30th September is a day of protests against the european stability mechanism treaty, I wanted to mention it. National governments will have to ask permission to spend their money, from an unelected and unaccountable shadow entity i.e. democracy goes away and we get fucked again.

    1. Re:Fuck the EU by lordholm · · Score: 3, Informative

      Firstly, let us start with another rant: the ESM treaty has nothing to do with the spending of the individual member states, this is handled by another treaty called TSCG (known as the fiscal compact), assuming you mean to protest against the fiscal compact and not actually the ESM treaty.

      By the fiscal compact, no one need to ask permission for spending, unless the spend well above what they have previously agreed to, which actually means running a huge deficit, which in turn result in the deficit having to be payed back by your children. From that point of view, there is no democracy in overspending now, since the people who have to pay for do not yet have the right to vote and the government does not spend their money, they spend their future tax payers money. The treaty also does allow for substantial deficits, but only if the budget is balanced over a cycle. I.e. you can go minus now, as long as you go plus in a few years. In addition, the people who have negotiated the treaty are democratically elected.

      I do not know how you interpret the EU as the successor of nazi-germany, this just plain ridiculous. I will ignore Godwin on this, as I honestly believe that you do the sufferers of the war a great injustice by saying this. The Union's primary purpose is after all to build a lasting peace in Europe. This said, the Union also have very high standards for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Everything opposite of the third reich.

      Should we go on... you may complain against some democratic deficiencies in the EU, but these issues are being solved. The main blockers of democratic reform so far has been the UK and some other member states. In either case, from the next EP elections (2014), the commission president will for example be selected from candidates laid out by the parliamentary groups before the election. In addition Barroso and others (e.g. the future group), have been pushing sweeping changes of the Union to guarantee power to the parliament. The lack of democracy at the EU level is solely the result of it being an intergovernmental organisation to some extent where the states have too much to say about things.

      --
      "Civis Europaeus sum!"
  9. Admiral! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Our cruisers can't repel firepower of that magnitude!

  10. Intense gamma ray source? by rtobyr · · Score: 2

    Didn't Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno show us why this is a bad idea?

  11. Imagine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    a beowulf cluster of these...

  12. Slashdot by Dunge · · Score: 0

    Real article about laser, comments about Dracula/Sharks/Dinosaurs/Beowulf and nothing serious.

    1. Re:Slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I seriously love lasers. And sharks.

      There. Are you happy now?

  13. Oh, damm, I mis-read it by ukoda · · Score: 0

    I have recently been thinking of buying a Romba to cleap the floors clean in my new apartment. It later here so in my tired reading of the headline I though that they had coupled an ultra-powerful laser with a Ronba. I had immediate visons on dust beling vaporised from several meters away. I was quite disappointed when I read the headline correctly. Sharks be dammed I think I have a new project.

  14. roar... by slew · · Score: 1

    Somehow, when I read this headline about romania, the first thing that came to mind was the q-bomb...

  15. Just like George Bush said by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 0

    "When in Rome, do as the Romanians do."

  16. The Hulk! by Sigvatr · · Score: 1

    I think a Romanian Hulk reboot is exactly what Hollywood needs right now.

  17. The most important question is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is it powerful enough that it will make a sound like "PEW PEW!!" when fired? It'd better be.

  18. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Last I checked, there were no sharks there, so what's the point?

    1. Re:Why? by Neil+Boekend · · Score: 1

      An extremely powerful laser (well beyond this) would theoretically generate particles in it's path. Maybe they are hoping those particles can be combined into a shark.

      --
      Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
  19. Ode to Joy! by andersh · · Score: 1

    Hear, hear!

  20. Români/Rumanians, Roma, Romans etc by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He picked pockets? Begged? Sold roses or fake gold jewlery? :)

    It's funny how the Roman Empire left us with several different types of "Romans";

    - Romans from the eternal city of Rome, Italian Republic.
    - Romans (romanus) from the Roman Empire's province of Dacia
    - Români/Rumanians from present day România (republic), consisting of the former Kingdoms of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania
    - Roma people (Indian immigrants, i.e. "gypsies"),

    The name România is a derivative of the Latin romanus, meaning "citizen of Rome".