Real Life Death Star

[vt]

The real-life DEATH STAR: US researchers developing laser 100,000 times more powerful than all of Earth's power stations combined

• Will emit a short laser burst with an intensity of 1023 watts per square centimetre
• 100,000 times more power than all the power stations in the world combined
• Laser bursts will last only 1/100,000th of a billionth of a second
• Laser being built by Lawrence Livermore lab in the US
  

By MARK PRIGG
PUBLISHED: 16:55 EST, 5 February 2014 | UPDATED: 17:00 EST, 5 February 2014

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It will be the most powerful laser ever created, and could give researchers incredible new insights into how the cosmos was created.
Called the High-Repetition-Rate Advanced Petawatt Laser System (HAPLS), it will emit 100,000 times more power than all the power stations in the world - for a tiny fraction of a second.
It has even been nicknamed the Death Star laser for its similarity to Darth Vader's laser wielding base in Star Wars.
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The project has been nicknamed the 'death Star' after the Star Wars craft that could blow up planets

HOW POWERFUL IS IT?


HAPLS is designed to ultimately generate a peak power greater than 1 petawatt (1015 or 1 quadrillion watts).
Each pulse will deliver 30 joules of energy in less than 30 femtoseconds (trillionths of a second or 0.00000000000003 seconds)—the time it takes light to travel a fraction of the width of a human hair.

The laser system will deliver these pulses of light at 10 hertz (10 repetitions per second).


The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) Beamlines project is an EU-funded lab being developed with experts from around the world, including Lawrence Livermore lab in the US, and being built in the Czech Republic.
Due to be switched on by 2017, it will emit a short laser burst with an intensity of 1023 watts per square centimeter.
'ELI will become the first international laser research facility, much like a ‘CERN for laser research’, hosting some of the world’s most powerful lasers enabling a new era of unique research opportunities for users from all countries,' said Professor Wolfgang Sandner, director general of the ELI-Delivery Consortium International Association (AIBSL).

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The system combines technologies from across Europe and around the world.
It relies on a scheme referred to as 'double-chirped pulse amplification,' enabling high signal to noise in the output pulses which will seed HAPLS.

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The 'death star' laser: The solid-state, short-pulse laser converts the energy from the pump laser to 30-joule, 30-femtosecond pulses for a peak power exceeding 1 petawatt. The laser system measures just 4.6 meters wide and 17 meters long.

'HAPLS’s high repetition rate will make possible new scientific discoveries,' said Livermore physicist and HAPLS project manager Constantin Haefner.

'While scientists have long performed experiments with powerful single-shot lasers, they have never had an opportunity to repeat experiments at 10 times per second.'

HAPLS will deliver ultrashort, high-energy laser pulses for generating secondary sources of electromagnetic radiation (such as high-brightness x rays) and accelerating charged particles (electrons, protons, or ions).

The laser technology will enable many applications in physics, medicine, biology, and materials science.

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An early prototype of the system

HAPLS will consist of two interconnected Livermore-designed laser systems that, when set up at ELI Beamlines, will require a combined space of about 4.6 by 17 meters, plus 4 square meters for the final laser pulse compressor.

The first system—a diode-pumped, solid-state laser—will energize or 'pump' the second system—a chirped-pulse-amplification, short-pulse laser.


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Inside the Death Star: After amplification in the short-pulse laser, the chirped pulse is passed through an arrangement of diffraction gratings to produce HAPLSâ€'s final high-energy, high-power laser pulse.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...#ixzz2sbdOfdne
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[don]

Re: Real Life Death Star

No military application . . . for taking the high(est) ground?

How big is the budget?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Real Life Death Star

It can be easy to mislead people by playing parlor tricks that exploit the difference between the formal definitions of energy and power.
In everyday conversation we use "energy" and "power" as synonyms, but to an engineer or scientist they are very different things.

Formally, energy is an amount, and power is a rate.
If you can deliver a modest amount of energy very fast, it becomes an impressively huge power rate.
That is the parlor trick here

The laser is only delivering 30 joules of energy. That is about the amount of energy you release by knocking a small bag of potatoes off the table onto the floor.
Hardly impressive.

But that energy is delivered in only 30 femtoseconds, a period of time so brief there is no practical example to get a feel for it.
A femtosecond is 0.000000000000001 second. One-one thousandth of a billionth of a second. Nearly zero.

Since the rate of power is defined as the amount of energy you deliver divided by the time over which it is delivered, we get a huge result for power for this laser.
Any of the bright students in 8th grade math class will tell you that when you divide by zero the answer is infinity, and when you divide by nearly zero the answer is fantastically huge.

For scientists working at sub-atomic scales, the huge power is real and effective.
30 joules is of no consequence at all to a big chunk of steel like a battle tank, but to an electron or a proton it is overwhelming, and that huge rate of power is truly like a death star if your "planet" is a tiny proton.

For a weapon, power alone is not sufficient; one must also deliver a large amount of energy.
A typical hand grenade delivers something like 500,000 joules of energy. This laser delivers just 30 joules.

Laser weapons have always struggled with energy rather than power.
The cancelled YAL-1A program never cleared this hurdle.
A 747 filled with tanks of violently reactive chemicals could not deliver a hand grenade's worth of energy to the target through a laser.




Here's a recent photo of it resting in the bone yard

[sunjeep]

Re: Real Life Death Star

It can be easy to mislead people by playing parlor tricks that exploit the difference between the formal definitions of energy and power.

A typical hand grenade delivers something like 500,000 joules of energy. This laser delivers just 30 joules.

Thanks for putting this in perspective for people. When the media writes science stories like this it really gets me angry, but then again, we get what we deserve. If people don't learn basic problem solving and analytical thinking then its alot easier to pull stuff like this.

For general amusement I give you the following website (one I have used in teaching my classes for years):

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Real Life Death Star

Thanks for putting this in perspective for people..l

You are welcome sun jeep. Science and engineering is my only serious contribution here at iTulip.
For finance and economics I am a student of the iTulip economists, quants, venture capitalists, hedge fund operators, and heavy hitting traders.
When I see this technology stuff I jump in as a self-appointed iTulip engineer-in-residence.

[ASH]

Re: Real Life Death Star

When I see this technology stuff I jump in as a self-appointed iTulip engineer-in-residence.

You are a huge asset to iTulip.

I thought I'd chime in with some additional thoughts on ABL. In terms of laser weapons like ABL, beam propagation through atmosphere is as much a problem as pulse energy. One of ABL's problems was that it needed to work at very long range -- they didn't want to have to fly the thing deep into enemy airspace; they wanted to fly comfortably outside enemy airspace and still be able to shoot boosting ballistic missiles being launched hundreds of km inside. (The ABL couldn't deal with North Korea's or Iran's integrated air defense system, and since ABL was meant to counter a surprise ballistic missile attack, there would be no time in such a scenario for the Air Force to take down those air defenses and establish open skies over the enemy territory.) Although air looks "clear" to us on the scale a few km (if we're lucky), shooting horizontally through 100 km of atmosphere is no joke. In addition to attenuation from scattering and absorption, density fluctuations in the air tend to distort the laser beam's focus. Put another way, not just the total energy delivered -- but the energy density (Joules per square meter) -- matters, because if your laser isn't focused down to a little spot, the energy will get spread over a wide area, and instead of heating up a tiny spot on the target to 5000 C (or whatever), you end up heating a much larger area on the target to a useless 50 C. Laser weapons are happening, but the systems that are likely to be fielded soon are shorter-range things for point defense against artillery shells, mortars, rockets, drones, and what have you, that only have to shoot a few km. For instance, the per-shot cost on a laser version of Israel's "Iron Dome" defense system would be lower than the cost of the incoming rockets, whereas the missile interceptor version of the current Iron Dome system costs a lot more than the targets it's meant to intercept.

Also, an aside about short laser pulses... one significance of the laser pulse duration is whether it's faster or slower than the physical mechanisms that transfer energy between different types of mechanical motion inside materials, and also relative to the speed of thermal conduction. The energy of the laser pulse initially goes into the primary absorption mechanism, which -- depending upon laser wavelength -- usually involves promoting electrons to higher-energy states. If the laser is short wavelength absorption may directly break chemical bonds; really short-wavelength laser shots could potentially kick electrons out of their atoms entirely, directly ionizing the material. For longer-wavelength light, absorption typically populates molecular orbitals of higher energy which soon relax, passing that energy on to other degrees of mechanical freedom within the material, such as molecular vibrations. Infrared light will stimulate molecular vibration directly, and microwaves tend to pump molecular rotations. Regardless, even in the case of broken bonds or actual ionization (free electrons), bonds soon reform and electrons get recaptured, and the energy that was absorbed ultimately gets randomized and shared across all the material's possible degrees of freedom (i.e. converted into heat). Then that heat is transported away from the site by some combination of radiation, conduction, or convection. If you have a laser pulse that is shorter than the relaxation time of excited electronic states, you have a good shot at vaporizing material directly struck by a short wavelength laser without heating the surrounding material. The energy deposited by the laser mostly breaks bonds, and the excess gets carried off by the vapor rather than conducted into the surrounding material. That's useful for laser machining of metals and, say, corneas. Short laser pulses can also produce explosive effects if the energy is deposited much faster than the local heating can be dissipated. So although pulse energy is really important, and the huge power figures associated with short laser pulses ought not be compared to things like light bulbs which operate continuously, the short pulse duration does have some implications about whether the laser is delivering a sharp kick, or a gentle shove.

[jk]

Re: Real Life Death Star

You are a huge asset to iTulip.

+1

and you too, ASH!

[GRG55]

Re: Real Life Death Star

You are a huge asset to iTulip.

...

++1

Engineers are the only people on iTulip that make posts I actually understand (sort of)

[shiny!]

Re: Real Life Death Star

++1

Engineers are the only people on iTulip that make posts I actually understand (sort of)

Wouldn't it be nice if all our politicians were engineers instead of lawyers?

[jk]

Re: Real Life Death Star

Wouldn't it be nice if all our politicians were engineers instead of lawyers?

that is often the case in china, iirc.

party secty xi jinping- chemical engineering.
his predecessor hu jintao- hydraulic engineering

premier li keqiang, otoh, got a degree in law and then a phd in economics.
his predecessor, wen jiabao-

Wen has a background in engineering and holds a post-graduate degree from the

Beijing Institute of Geology.^[2] He studied geomechanics in Beijing and began his career in the geology bureau of Gansu province. From 1968–1978, he presided over the Geomechanics Survey Team under the Gansu Provincial Geological Bureau and head of its political section. Wen succeeded in office, rising as chief of the Gansu Provincial Geological Bureau and later as Vice-minister of Geology and Mineral Resources

i think the difference is that in one party states, national politics is a kind of office politics but on a bigger scale.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Real Life Death Star

Wouldn't it be nice if all our politicians were engineers instead of lawyers?

We don't have a very good track record as political leaders.

Herbert Hoover.
Jimmy Carter.
John Sununu.

It just seems they are two entirely different talents -knowing how to get things done, versus know what ought to be done.

[shiny!]

Re: Real Life Death Star

We don't have a very good track record as political leaders.

Herbert Hoover.
Jimmy Carter.
John Sununu.

It just seems they are two entirely different talents -knowing how to get things done, versus know what ought to be done.

Except for being at the forefront of promoting the "own your own house campaign" I actually think Hoover had a pretty impressive list of accomplishments. And he was a distant cousin of mine ;-)