I got a tour of the lab during construction. As a software engineer, what I found most incredible about the project was how well they stuck to their delivery proposal and timeline over the course of five years of development.

> Optical devices called diffraction gratings stretch it out in time so that when the pump lasers dump power into the pulse, it doesn’t get so intense that it starts tearing the air apart.

Oh,my.

> "The crystal that we’re going to get in the summer will get us to 3 petawatts, and it took four and a half years to manufacture"

This entire thing is beyond cool. I hope the rest of the process goes smoothly for the teams involved!

Mount it in a jet and you could pop an entire house full of popcorn in seconds.

I don't think anyone should be impressed by watts. Jouls are where all the real work is.

Asside for the PR article. What's the use case for pettawatt laser pulse lasting 25 quintillionths of a second?

For anyone interested, the most powerful one is in Romania at the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) in Măgurele. It's about 10 petawatts.

Instead of petawatts I’d love to hear what it can destroy.

I imagine a scale like:

1: Mosquito

…

10000: Planet (Death Star)

What if we tried more power?

I am embarrassed to admit of thinking there’s a Family Guy joke somewhere in that headline.

star wars??? space wars???

china is on track to have a 100pettawatt laser operating this year called "The Station of Extream Light", SEL for short, which is going to be used to try and seperate energy and matter by breaking empty space. think that this links to the place building it http://english.siom.cas.cn/Newsroom/rp/202207/t20220701_3071... all in all good to have a competitive environment in reseach.......though the US government, cough, cough, might, nudge, think about, some funding there

In this very interesting video, a Russian drone developer gives his thoughts about laser weapons. In theory they work, they test it always on ideal atmospheric conditions. In practice, they don't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM

I see a number of comments here misunderstanding the power of this laser. Laser facilities like this one are designed for incredibly short pulses that are femtoseconds long, and total energy per pulse is typically on the order of tens of joules, roughly equivalent to a few seconds of your phone flashlight. They can’t destroy much of anything on human scales. They are made to do physics research, and there is absolutely no pathway from a 2 petawatt laser that delivers a few joules a minute to a 2 petawatt laser that hits full output power for a few seconds: that would be 10^16 times more energy, not to mention it that brief pulse would use more electricity than all the US uses in a year and completely destroy the University of Michigan in spectacular fashion (very roughly equivalent to a five megaton nuclear explosion.)

If you’re interested in the most energy per pulse, you want the “most energetic” laser, which is the NIF at LLNL. That’s about 2 megajoules per pulse or half a kilowatt hour. Definitely enough to kill a mosquito, but it doesn’t even register on the scale of Death Star style lasers from fiction.

And if you want the most destructive power, those are all military lasers. Which can absolutely destroy things science fiction style, but on a fairly small scale and with some important limitations.