MIT is building the most powerful super-laser ever

Sometimes a laser's quality and usefulness is measured in pure watts. In that respect, a new laser in production at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) can certainly hold its own: at a full petawatt, otherwise known as one quadrillion watts, it's powerful enough to drive the world's most demanding experiments.

MIT is building the most powerful super-laser ever Sometimes, though, you need a laser to be able to produce incredibly short bursts of light, and here it shines as well: each pulse from the laser lasts just 30 femtoseconds. At 10 Hz, it can fire these quadrillion watt bursts of light faster than an AK47.

The High Repetition Rate Advanced Petawatt Laser System (HAPLS) will be a major step forward for high-energy laser science, primarily because of that firing rate. A petawatt laser is not unheard of, since a watt is a measure of power over time — joules per second...

Click for the original source of the article

Bu Haber için yorum yapabilirsiniz 10.08.2014 19:40:39 204.236.235.245

Yorumlar()