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World's Most Powerful Laser Diode Arrays Deployed

Posted by Soulskill on from the aside-from-the-secret-white-house-defense-lasers dept.

Zothecula writes: The High-Repetition-Rate Advanced Petawatt Laser System (HAPLS) under construction in the Czech Republic is designed to generate a peak power of more than 1 petawatt. The key component to this instrument – the laser "pump" – will be a set of solid-state laser diode arrays recently constructed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At peak power, this electronic assemblage develops a staggering 3.2 million watts of power and are the most powerful laser diode arrays ever built.

12 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. Don't look at the... by Prof.Phreak · · Score: 3, Informative

    Laser Diode Arrays with remaining eye.

    --

    "If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy

    1. Re:Don't look at the... by bolek_b · · Score: 4, Funny

      Don't worry, we don't have any sharks in Czech Republic, we are a landlocked country. At best, we could come up with laser-bearing carps or catfish.

    2. Re:Don't look at the... by some+old+guy · · Score: 2

      You go first.

      --
      Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
  2. Lost Opportunity by deek · · Score: 2

    If only they had called it the High-repetition-rate Advanced Petawatt Laser Emission SyStem.

  3. In other news... by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 4, Funny

    World's largest cat goes mental

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re:In other news... by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Funny

      A complimentary comment is worth to me than mod points.

      But not as much as cash, so, y'know, if you really want to show your appreciation...

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  4. Re:Great. by Rei · · Score: 2

    Haven't even read the article, but I can tell you that such a thing is pretty much an essential requirement to have a chance of commercializing any sort of laser-driven inertial confinement fusion. A fusion reactor that can only fire off a pulse once every day or so is pretty worthless ;) The other high repetition rate component that you need is a high repetition precision injection of holhraums.

    There's two main types of reactors in particular to which this would apply. First you have your pure inertial confinement fusion schemes, like NIF, where it's all about single super-high energy compression pulses. Secondly you have your hybrid inertial confinement approaches like HiPER where you combine a weaker compression pulse with a thermal pulse so that you don't need to achieve such extreme compression. I'm personally rather fond of the second, but it's not as mature.

    --
    "TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
  5. Nerdy facts about this pulse by DrTJ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    T=30fs, P=1PW => E=30J
    Each pulse carries about 30 joules of energy.
    The pulse only lasts for 30 fs. In that time, it travels s=30fs*300 000 000 m/s = 9 um.
    The pulse is thus only 9 microns thick.

    They don't state the wavelength in the article, but since they say laser and not maser or IR laser, it's visible.
    With a nice green colour, i.e. 500 nm, the pulse is only 18 wavelengths long.

    The energy of each (green) photon is E=hc/lamda = 2.2E-20 J. Thus, each pulse packs about
    30J/2.2E-20J = 1.36E21 photons. [That's 1.5E26 photons per meter (mass of earth ~5E24 kg).]

    Good job, coordinating that rather sizable pack of riotous photons in a timely manner.

  6. Re:Consistency by joe_frisch · · Score: 4, Interesting

    the pump is probably 3.2MW for a long pulse (100s of microseconds), and the output is petawatts for a short time (femtoseconds).Diodes are often used to pump solid state laser materials that store energy for many microseconds, then release it much more quickly. (along with chirp pulse amplification to get even larger power compression).

  7. How not to edit a story by Andy_R · · Score: 2

    If you're going to edit an article, don't just cut out the least significant words, or you'll be left with nonsense.

    According to the summary, this laser somehow generates power instead of consuming it, and it generates "3.2 million watts of power", which is "more than 1 petawatt".

    --
    A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
  8. Things sure have changed... by sabbede · · Score: 3, Interesting
    When I was a kid, Czechoslovakia was a Soviet satellite hidden behind the Iron Curtain and a fog of evil. Now, one of our government's top research labs is building a big-ass laser (death ray) there.

    The future really is a much nicer place than the past.

  9. Big Ole Laser by jjbenz · · Score: 2

    Is it too late to make a comment about the Death Star?