1,000,000,000,000,000 watt LASER

Ron Czapala

Berkeley Laser Fires Pulses Hundreds of Times More Powerful Than All the World's Electric Plants Combined

http://news.yahoo.com/berkeley-laser-fires-pulses-hundreds-times-more-powerful-200000374.html

EXCERPT:

Imagine a device capable of delivering more power than all of the world s electric plants. But this is not a prop for the next James Bond movie. A new laser at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was put through its paces July 20, delivering pulses with a petawatt of power once per second. A petawatt is 10¹⁵ watts, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 watts about 400 times as much as the combined instantaneous output of all the world s electric plants.

How is that even possible? Well, the pulses at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) are both exceedingly powerful and exceedingly short. Each petawatt burst lasts just 40 femtoseconds, or 0.00000000000004 second. Since it fires just one brief pulse per second, the laser s average power is only about 40 watts the same as an incandescent bulb in a reading lamp.

Peter KG6LSE

40 Watts Equiv for a Equiv of 1 Sec .. 40 Joules .....

Now let's see that LASER last a few Sec . .....

Lawson

Yea, each pulse is 42 Joules! To put that in perspective, that's about 1/3rd the energy of a 90mph fast ball, (~120 J ) or around 1/7th the energy of a typical bullet. (~300 J ) That pulse WILL blow **** up if it's focused at all. (up to and including the mirrors and other components of the laser...)

Lawson

piguy101

The capacitors used must have a low ESR.

Peter KG6LSE

and low ESL too.



N2 Lasers are like this in a way .


Peter

Duane C. Johnson

While the article didn't say, I believe this class of laser starts with a very short laser pulse. This pulse then passes through a medium with special properties to get the ultra short high power pulse.

In all mediums the velocity of the photons move slower than the Speed of Light in free space. This speed in some mediums is slower as the power density increases. Since the leading edge of the pulse is slowed the trailing light kind of piles up on the front, causing more slowing and so on.

Apparently the pulse is shortened many thousands of times which greatly increases the peak power.

Cool huh!!

Duane J

skylight

Now i'm not suggesting looking into the laser but is that duration long enough to be visible to the naked eye? Could that laser be fired into space as a communication device, thinking SETI here.

Martin_H

When I used to follow this stuff, they would build multiple stages of glass or sapphire rods doped with a lasing element. Usually a rare earth element you never heard of. They optically pump the rods with a flashbulb and fire a laser pulse into one end. As Duane says the pulse gets shorter and more intense as it enters the solid, but because it is in a lasing medium the intensity builds even more as the doped element lases.

Fusion and weapons research was the primary usage back in the 1980's. But it makes sense that it might work as a linear accelerator too.

skylight wrote: »

Now i'm not suggesting looking into the laser but is that duration long enough to be visible to the naked eye? Could that laser be fired into space as a communication device, thinking SETI here.

Usually these pulses are in the infrared. But interstellar communication via lasers is definitely on the list of technologies SETI researchers consider viable.

Mark_T

To paraphrase Amazon "readers who like this thread will most likely enjoy reading about the NIF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility"