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!
If those can be put in another room then the noise goes way down.
Asside for the PR article. What's the use case for pettawatt laser pulse lasting 25 quintillionths of a second?
"Okay, hold really still..."
I don’t know if they are using laser scalpels in surgery. My medical fascination mostly ends at diagonostics and experimental procedures. If I don’t know anyone with a disorder I tend not to hear about new procedures. My friend in college was helping a prof work on picosecond violet lasers and now we are on femtosecond.
Bigger problem I suspect is children with white coat syndrome. When I was a kid doctors got away with being monstrous to children.
It doesn't make any sense to measure joules alone. _Any_ laser can output 2 petajoules. The only question is how long it takes to do that: hence Watts.
I imagine a scale like:
1: Mosquito
…
10000: Planet (Death Star)
So the log10 scale goes from 1–30, where mosquitos die at 1 and the Earth dies at 30. The 2 PW in the article is about a 15.3. The Vulcan 20-20 project (set to complete in 2029) will register at about 20PW, or a 16.3 on the mosquito-Death Star scale [2].
So on a log scale, we're over halfway to building the Death Star.
[0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/backyard-star-wars
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-energy-w...
[2]: https://news.sky.com/story/worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-be-...
I’m still not sure what 15.3 on the MDS scale can destroy but I am sure the Emperor will be pleased to hear that we are half-way to building the Death Star.
I think this is the crux of the assumption right here. It sounds like this is apply for well under a nanosecond.
I think we're closer to maybe killing a mosquito than "half way to building a Death Star on a log scale" (which, I guess is already much closer to a mosquito than a planet).
Measured in simple joules, mosquito is .04, earth is 10^32, and this laser is 50.
If we make a joules version of the 1-30 scale, the laser in the article would only score a 4.
So true "half way to a death star" is step 29/30?
Say your "endstage" goal is GPU with 200 billion transistors. Using linear scale, the current biggest GPU is only halfway there, and it took all of human civilization to get this far, and it will take another civilization to get to 200b. In reality, we'll have that in a couple years with our current civilization.
A hypothetical "death star" project like this would require improvements in energy generation/storage capacity/etc., which haven't improved in nearly the way transistor production has (and are also much more limited by physical realities, such as the specific heat, enthalpy of combustion etc. of materials).
[sic]?
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.
I love smart people who work on this stuff, a lot of what I take for granted is due to their efforts :)
That's about the amount of power used in your phone's flash when taking a picture, not a few seconds, but the LED being on for about 50-100 milliseconds.
Written text accuracy took a nosedive in the early '00s as newspapers couldn't afford to hire journalists with a scientific background, followed by universities not hiring scientists to write press releases any more. GIGO - garbage in, garbage out.
Sure, Ann Arbor may be destroyed, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. For Science. /insert Lord Farquaad meme here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
Once upon a time we tried developing a nuclear-pumped X-ray laser for use in strategic defense, which if my napkin math is correct was probably in the neighborhood of NIF in terms of energy output (despite the conversion efficiency being terrible). Notable is that NIF continues existing after it fires.
Not sure you can move NIF like you would move excalibur
The students were dutifully copying the lecture while I was sitting there with my mouth agape realizing that he was working through a simplified example of what energy storage was required for the X-ray laser. IIRC Those guys had their own substation, and would charge the capacitors. The switch would get thrown and the sublasers would shoot at the molybdenum target, which would laze in the X-ray spectrum (and the molybdenum would vaporize, I think.)
Afterwards, I asked him how on earth the energy was transferred from the caps to the sublasers: He just smiled and said "very carefully".
"Look at the facts. Very high power, portable, limited firing time, unlimited range. All you'd need is a big spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space."
cnees•10h ago