US lab debuts "Super Laser"

[CougarKing]

A US weapons lab on Friday pulled back the curtain on a super laser with the power to burn as hot as a star.

 

US lab debuts super laser 

World’s Most Powerful Laser Unveiled

A US weapons lab on Friday pulled back the curtain on a super laser with the power to burn as hot as a star.
The National Ignition Facility's main purpose is to serve as a tool for gauging the reliability and safety of the US nuclear weapons arsenal but scientists say it could deliver breakthroughs in safe fusion power.

"We have invented the world's largest laser system," actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said during a dedication ceremony attended by thousands including state and national officials.


"We can create the stars right here on earth. And I can see already my friends in Hollywood being very upset that their stuff that they show on the big screen is obsolete. We have the real stuff right here."

NIF is touted as the world's highest-energy laser system. It is located inside the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory about an hour's drive from San Francisco.

Equipment connected to a house-sized sphere can focus 192 laser beams on a small point, generating temperatures and pressures that exist at cores of stars or giant planets.

NIF will be able to create conditions and conduct experiments never before possible on Earth, according to the laboratory.

A fusion reaction triggered by the super laser hitting hydrogen atoms will produce more energy than was required to prompt "ignition," according to NIF director Edward Moses.

"This is the long-sought goal of 'energy gain' that has been the goal of fusion researchers for more than half a century," Moses said.

"NIF's success will be a scientific breakthrough of historic significance; the first demonstration of fusion ignition in a laboratory setting, duplicating on Earth the processes that power the stars."

Construction of the NIF began in 1997, funded by the US Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

"NIF, a cornerstone of the National Nuclear Security Administration's effort to maintain our nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing, will play a vital role in reshaping national security in the 21st century," said NNSA administrator Tom D'Agostino.

"This one-of-a-kind facility is the only place in the world that is capable of providing some of the most critical technical means to safely maintain the viability of the nation's nuclear stockpile."

Scientists say that NIF also promises groundbreaking discoveries in planetary science and astrophysics by recreating conditions that exist in supernovas, black holes, and in the cores of giant planets.

Electricity derived from fusion reactions similar to what takes place in the sun could help sate humanity's growing appetite for green energy, according to lab officials.

"Very shortly we will engage in what many believe to be this nation's greatest challenge thus far, one that confronts not only the nation but all of mankind -- energy independence," said lab director George Miller.

The lab was founded in 1952 and describes itself as a research institution for science and technology applied to national security.

"This laser system is an incredible success not just for California, but for our country and our world," Schwarzenegger said.

"NIF has the potential to revolutionize our energy system, teaching us a new way to harness the energy of the sun to power our cars and homes."

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.12fab6f6c00a65e15e6fb5e305aacbb7.41&show_article=1

Looks familiar.  ;D

 

 

[a_majoor]

The US Navy works on a smaller version for ships. IMO electromagnetic railguns would be more useful as they as not as limited by atmospheric conditions like lasers are (although an aircraft orbiting overhead with a laser would compliment the  railgun system nicely)

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4321422.html

The Navy's New 100 KiloWatt Laser Weapons

The Office of Naval Research has awarded Raytheon a year-long contract to develop the preliminary design of a 100 kilowatt experimental Free Electron Laser (FEL) for naval warships. A FEL uses superconducting electron accelerators to produce high-power laser beams that could target cruise missiles, airplanes or boats. FEL operators can adjust the laser's wavelength by adjusting the energy of the electrons in the accelerator, something conventional laser's can't do. This allows them to be used on ships without suffering disturbances from the water vapor-rich environment. Raytheon has 12 months to create a preliminary design, the first step in the $150 million, three-phase ONR program. —Joe Pappalardo

 

[CBH99]

I'm no expert, and I'm probably wrong on this...

But isn't there a good chance of igniting the atmosphere & killing us all in a chain reaction if we all of a sudden have something burning as hot as the sun here on earth??

Isn't that one of the concerns of large solar flares is - is that a direct impact from a large and potent flare could cause the gases in the atmosphere to ignite??  Wouldn't this be a concern??

 

[SeaKingTacco]

Please tell me you are joking....

 

[a_majoor]

Laser weapon update. The USN is really going all out in futuristic warfare, sponsiring a 42 MW railgun as well as this laser weapon:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/unexpectedly-navys-superlaser-blasts-away-a-record/

Unexpectedly, Navy’s Superlaser Blasts Away a Record
 
* By Spencer Ackerman Email Author
    * February 18, 2011  |
    * 3:36 pm  |
    * Categories: Lasers and Ray Guns
 
NEWPORT NEWS, Virginia — Walking into a control station at Jefferson Labs, Quentin Saulter started horsing around with his colleague, Carlos Hernandez. Saulter had spent the morning showing two reporters his baby: the laboratory version of the Navy’s death ray of the future, known as the free-electron laser, or FEL. He asked Hernandez, the head of injector- and electron-gun systems for the project, to power a mock-up electron gun — the pressure-pumping heart of this energy weapon — to 500 kilovolts. No one has ever cranked the gun that high before.

Smiling through his glasses and goatee, Hernandez motioned for Saulter to click and drag a line on his computer terminal up to the 500-kV mark. He had actually been running the electron injector at that kilovoltage for the past eight hours. It’s a goal that eluded him for six years.

Saulter, the program manager for the free-electron laser, was momentarily stunned. Then he realized what just happened. “This is very significant,” he says, still a bit shocked. Now, the Navy “can speed up the transition of FEL-weapons-system technology” from a Virginia lab to the high seas.

Translated from the Nerd: Thanks to Hernandez, the Navy will now have a more powerful death ray aboard a future ship sooner than expected, in order to burn incoming missiles out of the sky or zap through an enemy vessel’s hull.

“Five hundred [kilovolts] has been the project goal for a long time,” says George Neil, the FEL associate director at Jefferson Labs, whose Rav 4 license plate reads LASRMAN. “The injector area is one of the critical areas” of the whole project.

The free-electron laser is one of the Navy’s highest-priority weapons programs, and it’s not hard to see why. “We’re fast approaching the limits of our ability to hit maneuvering pieces of metal in the sky with other maneuvering pieces of metal,” says Rear Adm. Nevin Carr, the Navy’s chief of research. The next level: “fighting at the speed of light and hypersonics” — that is, the free-electron laser and the Navy’s Mach-8 electromagnetic rail gun.

Say goodbye to an adversary’s antiship missiles, and prepare to fire bullets from 200 miles away, far from shoreline defenses. No wonder the Navy asked Congress to double its budget for directed-energy weapons this week to $60 million, most of which will go to the free-electron laser.

It won’t be until the 2020s, Carr estimates, that a free-electron laser will be mounted on a ship. (Same goes for the rail gun.) Right now, the free-electron laser produces a 14-kilowatt beam. It needs to get to 100 kilowatts to be viable to defend a ship, the Navy thinks. But what happened at Jefferson Labs Friday shrinks the time necessary to get to 100 kilowatts and expands the lethality of the laser. Here’s why.

Excite certain kinds of atoms, and light particles — photons — radiate out. Reflect that light back into the excited atoms, and more photons appear. But unlike a lightbulb, which glows in every direction, this second batch of photons travels only in one direction, and in a single color, or wavelength.  Which slice of the spectrum depends on the “gain medium” — the type of atoms — you use to generate the beam. But the free-electron laser is unique: It doesn’t use a medium, just supercharged electrons run through a racetrack of superconductors and magnets — an accelerator, to be technical — until it produces a beam that can operate on multiple wavelengths.

That means the beam from the free-electron laser won’t lose potency as it runs through all the crud in ocean air, because its operators will be able to adjust its wavelengths to compensate. And if you want to make it more powerful, all you need to do is add electrons.

But to add electrons, you need to inject pressure into your power source, so the electrons shake out and run through the racetrack. That’s done through a gun called an injector. In the basement of a building in Jefferson Labs, a 240-foot racetrack uses a 300-kilovolt injector to pressurize the electrons out of 200 kilowatts of power and send them shooting through the accelerator. (Interpolation. Pressure has nothing to do with this. He means injecting electrons at a higher voltage. Increasing the amperage [amount of electrons] will also have a positive effect.)

Currently, the free-electron laser project produces the most-powerful beam in the world, able to cut through 20 feet of steel per second. If it gets up to its ultimate goal, of generating a megawatt’s worth of laser power, it’ll be able to burn through 2,000 feet of steel per second. Just add electrons.

And that’s why Hernandez’s achievement is so important. He shrugs, concealing his pride. A powerful accelerator at Cornell University is “stuck at 250″ kilovolts, he grins. And he’s on a roll. Hernandez’s team fired up the injector in December with enough pressure to prove the FEL will ultimately reach megawatt class. Steel: Beware.

“It definitely shortens our time frame for getting to 100 kilowatts,” Saulter says, and it produces a “more powerful light beam.” But he won’t speculate on how much sooner this means the laser can get into the fleet. In any case, the Navy doesn’t yet have the systems to divert the amount of power from its ships’ generators necessary to operate the laser, but anticipates it will by the 2020s.

There are still a lot of obstacles to getting the free-electron laser onto a ship. The 240-foot racetrack that Neil built at Jefferson Labs — a scale model of one that’s underground here, seven-eighths-of-a-mile long — is way too big. Boeing has a contract to build an initial workable prototype by 2012, but by 2015 the racetrack has to be much, much smaller: 50 feet by 20 feet by 10 feet. And as the model shrinks, it’s got to get more efficient in harvesting photons from electrons.

But that starts by getting more electrons out of the power source.The better the injector is at that, the more powerful a beam results, even presuming that the engineers can’t keep finding efficient ways of getting their photons. Walking into a conference room, Saulter is still stunned. He figured he’d just wind Hernandez up by putting the project’s ultimate goal in his colleague’s face. “I had no idea he’d get up to that today.”

 

[a_majoor]

Pretty impressive amount of amplification in this system. Terrawatts of energy is a measurment comparable to the electrical consumption of the United States, compressed into a small fraction of a second. There are some pretty awesome implications for weapons with amplifiers as small and efficient as the one described here, this will fit aboard aircraft and even small ships, and the use of a beam broken into ultra fast and high powered pulses will be similar to being struck with bullets (each pulse will rapidly vapourize any material it comes in contact with, and the sudden thermal shock and impulse from the vapourized materials blasting away from the target will send high energy shockwaves through the target. Enough in a short span of time could cause considerable damage).

http://ichf.edu.pl/press/2013/10/IChF131003a_EN.pdf

The art of amplification: a desktop-size 10 terawatt laser

A compact new generation optical amplifier has been constructed by physicists
from the Laser Centre of the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy
of Sciences and the Faculty of Physics of the Warsaw University. The apparatus is
extremely efficient and small enough to fit on a desktop and is able to generate
over 10 terawatt light pulses.

Can a device with a footprint not larger than half of a desktop produce power a few dozen times
higher than that generated by all nuclear power stations worldwide? The answer is: “yes – in a
pulse”! A new parametric amplifier constructed in the Laser Centre at the Institute of Physical
Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPC PAS) and the Faculty of Physics of the Warsaw
University (FUW) allows to produce very short (femtosecond) laser pulses with a giant power of 10
terawatt. The new amplifier represents an important step towards construction of compact,
portable, relatively low cost high power laser devices that could revolutionize, e.g., anti-cancer
therapies.

“Theoretically, the efficiency of parametric amplifiers can reach over 50%. In practice, the best
amplifiers of this type are operated at an efficiency of about 30%. We have reached this level
already now, and what's more, in a really compact device”, says Dr Yuriy Stepanenko (IPC PAS),
the chief constructor of the amplifier, adding: “We still improve our setup. In the coming months we
are going to increase the amplifier's efficiency by another a few per cent on one hand, while on the
other we intend to increase the power of laser pulses up to a few tens of terawatts”.

Most lasers generating ultrashort pulses amplify light using sapphire crystals doped with titanium
ions. An external laser is used to pump energy into the crystal, and a fraction of the energy is
subsequently taken over by a laser beam being amplified. The method has numerous
disadvantages. One of the major ones is that the crystals warm up strongly leading to adverse
distortions of the cross section of the laser beam. As a result, the crystals must cool down virtually
after each laser shot.

Luckily, non-linear optical effects can be used to construct amplifiers of a different type. These
parametric amplifiers transfer effectively energy directly from the pumping laser beam to the beam
being amplified. As the input energy is not stored anywhere, there are no adverse thermal effects,
and the amplified pulses have excellent parameters. Parametric amplifiers can amplify light by
hundreds of millions of times on an optical path of a few centimeters only. That’s also why they are
really small in size, especially as compared with the standards of high power optics. The
instrument from the Laser Centre of the IPC PAS and the FUW comfortably fits half of a typical
desktop.

The new amplifier will be used for construction of an x-ray source and to generate experimentally
protons and secondary neutrons.

One of the long-term objectives of the research onparametric amplifiers is to generate laser pulses
with power of 200 TW and higher. Such powerful light pulses could be used for accelerating
protons to energies that are useful in medical therapies, for instance to selectively kill cancer cells.
The existing techniques for proton acceleration require construction of huge and high cost
accelerators. High power lasers would allow for significant increase in availability of the state-ofthe-
art proton therapies, with simultaneous radical reduction of treatment costs for cancer patients.
The research on the parametric amplifier is financed by the National Centre for Research and
Development (Project NR02001910).

The multi-pass optical parametric amplifier NOPCPA (Noncollinear Optical Parametric Chirped
Pulse Amplifier) technology has been since 2005 developed in the Laser Centre of the IPC PAS
and the FUW in a team headed by Prof. Czesław Radzewicz.
This press release was prepared thanks to the NOBLESSE grant under the activity “Research
potential” of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union.

The Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (http://www.ichf.edu.pl/) was established in 1955 as one of the
first chemical institutes of the PAS. The Institute's scientific profile is strongly related to the newest global trends in the development of
physical chemistry and chemical physics. Scientific research is conducted in nine scientific departments. CHEMIPAN R&D Laboratories,
operating as part of the Institute, implement, produce and commercialise specialist chemicals to be used, in particular, in agriculture and
pharmaceutical industry. The Institute publishes approximately 200 original research papers annually.

CONTACTS:
Dr Yuriy Stepanenko
Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences
tel. +48 22 3433446, +48 22 3433412
email: [email protected]

RELATED LINKS:
http://www.ichf.edu.pl/res/CL/
Laser Center at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
http://www.ichf.edu.pl/

Website of the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
http://www.ichf.edu.pl/press/
Press releases of the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences