The article linked to a list of applicable research. …umich.edu/…/most-powerful-laser-in-the-us-to-be-…
Comment on The most powerful laser in the US recently produced 2 quadrillion watts of power
PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I have a decent grasp of physics but I understand nothing at all about this article. Melp me out, please?
What use is a high energy beam that last for an almost immeasurably short period of time? How can it even be said that it has this power output, in such a short time?
“Zero-POW!-zero” sounds unbelievable to normal humans. No ramp-up? No sizzling out?
On such a short time scale, what’s the actual Wh used? It can’t be very much, so the actual energy delivered can hardly do anything at all, either.
And finally, what’s even the point of this? What’s the purpose? What’s the end goal? Why?
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
The laws of physics are best understood at standard temperatures and pressures, where we have loads of data. To understand how physics works in more extreme circumstances, we have to create those circumstances and then measure what happens. At CERN, they accelerate particles very fast, smash them together, and record and analyze what happened. This is how they observed the Higgs boson and measured its properties.
From the article, it looks like one of the experiments is to shoot the laser into an oncoming high speed beam of electrons. One of the things they’re looking for is if this high amount of energy causes matter and anti matter pairs to spontaneously form and annihilate. Our theories predict this but the more ways we can measure it the more we can learn, for instance about what happened right after the big bang, and why we were left with matter instead of everything annihilating symmetrically.
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It has a lot of value.
Firstly, we use lasers to measure chemical reactions, this one could increase resolution and potentially be used to trigger or shape the reaction.
Secondly, it could be a path towards laser-induced fusion which is kind of important.
Finally, modrrn chips are fabricated using something called an extreme-UV process, that uses sputtered tin hit with a multiple precision laser pulses. This could be used to refine that process further.