UT owns world's most powerful laser

UT houses a laser, nestled in a cramped basement room, that created the brightest light in the universe for fractions of a second March 31, beaming the University into the international spotlight.

After four years under construction, the Texas Petawatt laser reached 1.1 petawatts of power, making it the most powerful laser in the world. The only other laser that can reach petawatt capacity is in the United Kingdom.

The laser sits on a 30-foot-long table in a room that filters particles out of the air. Hundreds of optic components are hand-bolted to the table to create a pathway for the laser beam to compress and amplify the energy. This process keeps the light beams from damaging the equipment and still generates as much energy as possible.

The beam ultimately travels about 200 feet back and forth through a series of optics and amplifiers until it reaches its target that rests in a chamber about the size of a kickball.

Todd Ditmire, a physics professor and the director of the Texas Petawatt project, explained the laser's power. The sunlight that falls on the state of Texas yields 100 trillion watts. A petawatt is the equivalent of 1,000-million-million watts of energy.

The power focuses on an area one-tenth the width of a human hair and occurs fast enough for 1 million laser pulses to stack end to end in the time it takes to blink an eye, said Mikael Martinez, Texas Petawatt's project manager. Dimensions as small as this create temperatures up to 10 million degrees Celsius, hotter than the center of the sun.

This creates conditions similar to the center of stars, allowing scientists to understand astrophysics in previously inconceivable ways.

"With lasers like this, we can bring some of that down to earth in a laboratory," Ditmire said.

The Texas Petawatt's unique system of shortening the pulse and amplifying light energy to generate so much power also enables the system to create neutrons that aid in understanding how nuclear reactors age over time.

Martinez hopes the laser, which has undergone construction since 2004, will continuously generate enough power by the end of the summer to fire its first shots.

"This makes us extremely proud," said Martinez, who added that the laser appeared on Wired.com.

"Other people have impressive lasers, but this puts us in an internationally unique regime where we can perform high-density experiments that no one else can."

Comments

Be the first to comment on this article!

Add comment


I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.

Enter the characters in the image above:

log out