Only a few months ago, the University of Michigan laser, nicknamed HERCULES, was shown with an impressive 300 terawatts of power.
Well it appears as though the title of most powerful laser wasn't meant to be owned by University of Michigan for very long. The University of Texas at Austin has apparently created a laser that will have a power level of 1 petawatt, yep that 1000 terawatts. Just keep in mind that the power usage of your standard 60 Watt light bulb is about 16,700,000,000 times less output than this lasers potential output.
The power of this laser is 2000 times larger than the entire United States power generation capability. It would be brighter than the Sun, if you were walking on the surface of the sun. The only down side, the laser lasts only one tenth of a trillionth of a second.
The one question that I come up with is... Why? Not sure how this will be of great importance in the near future, but I'm sure they'll find a use for it... Death Ray anyone?
Check out the article at Engadget!
Godspeed
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
A Tad Bit Unnecessary
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2 comments:
I actually heard talk oh so many years ago about using high powered lasers to try and start a fusion reaction. Maybe if they can get this bad boy to last a bit longer it could do something like that.
Yeah, they have been trying to use lasers for a long time to trigger fusion. It has yet to do anything but use a whole hell of a lot of energy. Maybe this is the laser to do it though, we'll see :)
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