Super Powerful Laser Debuts

Berkeley Laser Fires Pulses Hundreds of Times More Powerful Than All the World’s Electric Plants Combined

 

By John Matson | August 1, 2012 | 

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BELLA laser. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Blink and you’ll miss it. Don’t blink, and you’ll still miss it.
Imagine a device capable of delivering more power than all of the world’s electric plants. But this is not a prop for the next James Bond movie. A new laser at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was put through its paces July 20, delivering pulses with a petawatt of power once per second. A petawatt is 10¹⁵ watts, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 watts—about 400 times as much as the combined instantaneous output of all the world’s electric plants.

MORE: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/08/01/berkeley-laser-fires-pulses-hundreds-of-times-more-powerful-than-all-the-worlds-electric-plants-combined/

Source: Scientific American Magazine

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