Japanese Laboratory Fires World's Most Powerful Laser

Holy damn, that's just a lot of energy. I could imagine this like these solving our energetic problems in the future.

source

A new laser, claimed to have been fired within a laboratory in Japan, is the most powerful on Earth.

The laser is situated in Osaka University and is called the Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments or LFEX. The mighty megalaser is roughly 100 meters (300 feet) long. 

1000 times the total energy of wolf's electricity consumption ever? If i'm not mistaken, we produce the same ammount as an atomic bomb everyday (around 23 kilotons if i record). This is pretty scary:

The laser emits a staggering amount of energy: two petawatts or two quadrillion watts, which is equivalent to nearly 1,000 times the total of the world's electricity consumption ever. The energy of the laser beam is so vast that the laser has entered the record books as the most powerful laser ever fired, according to the researchers. The second most powerful, the Texas Petawatt Laser, emits only half the amount of power of the LFEX laser.

You may think that producing such a staggering amount of energy would require an earth-shattering amount of power. It turns out that the energy required is closer to that needed to run a microwave for two seconds, according to a statement released from the university. The only difference is that this energy, instead of being spread out over two seconds, is condensed to a time of one picosecond (a trillionth of a second). The incredible final energy of the laser beam requires the assistance of four amplifiers: glass lamps that resemble fluorescent tubes.

The researchers have been running experiments continuously for the last month to confirm the power of the laser. Currently, there are only reports from the researchers that the laser has been fired and the results are unpublished, so we'll have to sit tight for footage.

Now that the team has achieved firing the world's most powerful laser, they are going to set the bar even higher.

"With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts," said Jyunji Kawanaka, from Osaka University.

I wish the scientists good luck on their research.

1000x the total consumption of the worlds energy.. ever?

that seems like an insane amount...

surely if they can make this they can find a way to harness it ?

with that amount of energy....and the e=mc2 conversion factor....what is the net gravitational effect? I know LANL and LLNL were doing some laser/gravity type experiments (Shiva Nova). This laser is more powerful than LANL's?

So what are the implications ? And aren't lasers and mirrors being used to bend time in some other experiment? If it is, this is gonna be an exciting year for discovery.

I skimmed the article... Sounds cool.
I wonder how much energy it consumes, if it puts out so much...
1000 times the amount of electricity we've EVER consumed?! In a picasecond? (or whatever it said)
No more energy problems ever again?

No wonder electricity costs so much with these eggheads burning so much so quickly.

Article said the power used was equivalent to a 1000 watt microwave oven output running for 2 seconds.
Certainly a short enough blast to start a fusion ignition but was it focused in a small enough area?
They should have invented a safe microfusion reactor by now.
Then again, remember the wait 20 year wait for the laser CD from the 1960's?

Really high value for I is the clue.

V = IR
V/R=I

Really low R value means superconductor involved.

Satyendra Nath Bose 1920's.

If this handheld laser can start fires I wonder what a quadrillion watt laser can do.

a reply to: Frocharocha

Ehh....I won't hold my breath too long.

The insanely short amount of time that it is using that power seems unlikely they will harness it and be able to keep sustainable energy usage in the near future.

I don't think this will be on the shelves any time soon.

Nice find though.

As a clarification -

power is not energy. There's a huge huge difference, and that shows up in articles like this one. I think the article I read this morning was from The Guardian, which was atrocious. It's a sad world when BBC and Guardian are consistently crappier in their science reporting than Daily Mail.

However, power is the number that tells you the flow rate of the energy, if you will. A hair dryer uses about 1kW, that's a power number. So, when you get a power number, as the journos so love to do, they're telling you the rate at which something delivers energy. Not the amount of energy it delivers. They are two totally different things. That's why there's this confusing thing in there that it has a power of two petawatts but only the energy of about 3 kW-sec, "a microwave run for about two seconds".

When they say it delivers "1000 times the amount of power ever delivered", that's a power number. Not an energy number. Visualize it this way. Let's say the "amount of power ever delivered" was represented by a railroad engine, going 50 kph pulling a few tens of thousands of tons. And you've got a drag racer that can go 500 kph. It's true that the drag racer is 100 times faster. The rate is a lot different. But the total amount of work done can't be compared - the drag racer has nowhere near the total work capacity of the train.

Similarly, this laser can deliver a small amount of energy very VERY quickly. The rate at which it can deliver energy is amazing. But the total amount of energy is something you could get out of a car battery.

This laser is for fusion experiments, where it's going to be used to compress and hopefully ignite fusion in a small D-T pellet. You have to do that very very quickly or the pellet will either manage to squirt in all directions and NOT compress, or the temperature rise will radiate away before the compression completes. To fuse in this manner requires you to really crunch the crap out of it in billionths of a second or better. So far, our last go at it, NIF, was unable to achieve ignition with 500 terawatts in a bit less than 2 picoseconds. This laser will start out about 4x that and go to 40x, if they can manage it. There were occasional (disputed) runs at NIF that looked like they were on the edge of ignition.

a reply to: Frocharocha

Doesn't that huge amount of power from a small amount of power violate basic physics?
What's the catch?

originally posted by: Aliensun
a reply to: Frocharocha

Doesn't that huge amount of power from a small amount of power violate basic physics?
What's the catch?

Power is not energy.

An alkaline AA battery has a total energy of about 4 W-h. If I could deliver that energy in a picosecond, it would be about 14,400 trillion Watts! That's a power number. The total energy is still 4 W-h. The faster you can deliver energy, even if it's not a LOT of energy, that power number goes up. If you can do it in a picosecond, that power number goes WAY up.

a reply to: Bedlam

I have visions of laser weapons expending spent capacitors like casings.... Pew pew pew!!

originally posted by: mindseye1609
a reply to: Bedlam

I have visions of laser weapons expending spent capacitors like casings.... Pew pew pew!!

NIF pretty much does that...sad to say.

originally posted by: Frocharocha
Holy damn, that's just a lot of energy. I could imagine this like these solving our energetic problems in the future.

source

A new laser, claimed to have been fired within a laboratory in Japan, is the most powerful on Earth.

The laser is situated in Osaka University and is called the Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments or LFEX. The mighty megalaser is roughly 100 meters (300 feet) long. 

1000 times the total energy of wolf's electricity consumption ever? If i'm not mistaken, we produce the same ammount as an atomic bomb everyday (around 23 kilotons if i record). This is pretty scary:

The laser emits a staggering amount of energy: two petawatts or two quadrillion watts, which is equivalent to nearly 1,000 times the total of the world's electricity consumption ever. The energy of the laser beam is so vast that the laser has entered the record books as the most powerful laser ever fired, according to the researchers. The second most powerful, the Texas Petawatt Laser, emits only half the amount of power of the LFEX laser.

You may think that producing such a staggering amount of energy would require an earth-shattering amount of power. It turns out that the energy required is closer to that needed to run a microwave for two seconds, according to a statement released from the university. The only difference is that this energy, instead of being spread out over two seconds, is condensed to a time of one picosecond (a trillionth of a second). The incredible final energy of the laser beam requires the assistance of four amplifiers: glass lamps that resemble fluorescent tubes.

The researchers have been running experiments continuously for the last month to confirm the power of the laser. Currently, there are only reports from the researchers that the laser has been fired and the results are unpublished, so we'll have to sit tight for footage.

Now that the team has achieved firing the world's most powerful laser, they are going to set the bar even higher.

"With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts," said Jyunji Kawanaka, from Osaka University.

I wish the scientists good luck on their research.

It's basically sensationalization. It's fired for such a short period that it uses almost no energy at all, but if it ran for a full 24 hours it would be insane.

The amount of energy it takes you to make microwave popcorn would keep this machine running for years.

If they used the EXACT SAME amount of energy, and delivered it in 1/10th of a picosecond, it would not be 10,000 the total energy ever used .. while using the same amount of energy.

I had to...I just had to...

a reply to: MystikMushroom

Can't lie, I had the same thought.

Using the AA battery petrasecond example, could you create a laser, small but capable of killing a fly say on the other side of the room?

Or does it not travel like that?

I need to replace the blue ray laser, it's so 2015.

a reply to: Forensick

It all comes back to the power vs energy question
Let's say an AA cell holds a total amount of energy of 3000mAh with a terminal voltage of 1.5V which means it should supply 3A at 1.5V for 1 hour, a total of 3*1.5*1 = 4.5 watt.hours
Store all of that 4.5Wh and release it in:
1 minute = 270 watts
1 second = 16.2kW
1uSec = 16.2GW
1pSec = 16.2 x 10^15 watts
etc etc
You are still unleashing just the 4.5Watt.hours you started with (minus system losses) so nothing is gained apart from a nice, albeit very brief, light show.

The laser is just a flashgun on steroids if put in the simplest terms and produces no energy unless it succeeds in producing fusion in the target.

"The energy of the laser beam is so vast that the laser has entered the record books as the most powerful laser ever fired, according to the researchers."

Great. Sounds awesome....just one teeny weeny little question though. World's most powerful laser....what the hell do you fire it AT? Surely they didn't fire it straight into the sky, there's no way to know what it might hit way out there, so what substance on Earth could they fire this much power at to even test it??? o.O