Photo of the Week - The 500-Terawatt Laser Shot

July 17, 2012 By News Staff

Fifteen years of work by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) team paid off on July 5 with a historic record-breaking laser shot, according to LLNL. The NIF laser system of 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target. Five hundred terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.

Shown above are the preamplifiers of the NIF, which are the first step in increasing the energy of laser beams as they make their way toward the target chamber.

Photo by Damien Jemison/LLNL

You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/photos/Photo-of-the-Week-The-500-Terawatt-Laser-Shot-07172012.html

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Comments

Doc | Commented July 18, 2012

Very interesting. Two questions. 1. How much energy did it use to create the 500 TW? 2. What can we do with it?

Mark | Commented July 18, 2012

The answer to your 2nd question can be found in the article at the end of the link. "Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics' grand challenges -- igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target."

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