World's most powerful laser is what Dr. Evil wants for Christmas

Just how strong is the world's most powerful laser on earth? Powerful enough to light a match with ease? Try 500 trillion matches.

The BBC took a trip to the National Ignition Facility in California and had a look at the new laser record holder — a combination of 192 of the world's most powerful lasers. Hailed as "the laser to end all lasers," the laser has 500 trillion watts of energy.

Capable of striking at the same time (at once billionth of a second), the laser can generate up to 500 times more energy than the entire American national grid.

Thanks to nuclear fusion — a reaction that combines the nuclei of atoms and results in the release of huge amounts of energy, the laser would probably make for a very awesome doomsday present. Dr. Evil and Darth Vader would be giddy as a school girl if they found this under their Christmas tree.

LASERS ON THE HIGH SEAS

The U.S. Navy wants to put powerful lasers on its ships to shoot down artillery shells and even cruise missiles at the speed of light (and really, who wouldn't). But there are a few scientific details to sort out before sailors can deploy the beams. "First we want to make sure the physics is right before throwing buckets of salt water over the thing," says Ed Pogue.

Pogue is the program manager for Boeing's free electron laser (FEL) program, potentially the most ambitious laser weapons program since the Pentagon's controversial airborne laser. In that program, the Missile Defense Agency spent billions of dollars and over a decade to get a laser-rigged jumbo jet to destroy a ballistic missile in its boost phase of flight. They eventually succeeded in February 2010, but the Obama administration nixed plans to develop the experiment into a battle-ready weapon.

Maybe the Navy's project will meet a better fate. In 5 years, at a cost of $163 million, Boeing hopes to get the physics right and demonstrate an extremely powerful--and hopefully seaworthy--giant laser. It's no small task, in part because the laser they're using is powered by several particle accelerators.

National Ignition Facility: The most powerful laser on this planet

Reading a BBC article yesterday about the resurrection of cold fusion, I ran into a mention of the National Ignition Facility — which, I discovered, is the most powerful laser system on earth. 12,700 tons of rebar! 500 trillion watts of photonic destruction. But best of all, an absolutely superior website, at least by the standards of most federal internet presence. The layman's overviews are clear without being dumbed-down, and the in-depth stuff has enough sciency fodder to keep we nerds fat and happy for hours.

Texans Build World’s Most Powerful Laser

Scientists have switched on the world’s most powerful laser, which for one-trillionth of a second is 2,000 times more powerful than all the power plants in the United States. The laser’s output tops a petawatt, which is a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) watts of power.

In the basement of the physics building at the University of Texas at Austin, the school’s High Intensity Laser Science Group built a petawatt laser in hopes of recreating astronomical phenomena like supernovae in miniature.

First, the newly elongated seed pulse is juiced by entirely different lasers using special crystals in a process called optical parametric amplification. This takes the power of the laser all the way to one joule. Then, it hits the rod amplifier, which is a 24-centimeter-long piece of glass that gets pumped with lights that the laser pulse can absorb. Finally, that pulse is fed through a disk amplifier, which can be seen below. Inside this amplifier, two disks of glass are juiced with pump lights that, after four passthroughs, bring the laser up to about 250 joules of energy.

The actual laser pulse will come out of the round hatch seen at the left of the chamber, where it will be directed at a target to mimic a nuclear explosion or an exotic dense star.

The work is sponsored by the National Nuclear Security Administration and totaled about $7 million in equipment costs.

World’s Most Powerful Laser has the Energy of a Hydrogen Bomb

Scientists working at the National Ignition Facility of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, have built the most powerful laser in the world, capable of simulating the energy force of a hydrogen bomb and the sun itself.

The Energy Department is expected to announce Tuesday that it has officially certified the National Ignition Facility, which would clear the way for a series of experiments which scientists hope will eventually will mimic the heat and pressure found at the center of the sun.

The successful completion of the laser is the culmination of more than a decade of work at a cost of $3.5 billion.