Recent claims suggest that Japan fired the most powerful laser in the world. The nation said that it has created the world’s most powerful laser. Reports suggest that scientists from Osaka have developed a 2 petawatt laser, using a device named the LFEX (Laser for Fast Ignition Experiment).
Scientists said that the new laser has a power beam that is comparable to 1,000 times the total consumption of energy in the entire world. But while it generated an enormous amount of power, the energy that was needed for the laser beam itself was comparable to that used inside a microwave for just a couple of seconds. The group of scientists created the high output out of the low energy by firing the beam for only a trillionth of a second.
To increase the power of the laser beam, the scientists used glass panels that were strategically placed and which were supplied with power along the LFEX device. The LFEX device is 328 feet long. The people behind the recent experiment said that these glass panels were used to focus the laser beam in order to increase its energy while it moved across the device.
An associate professor of electrical engineering at the Osaka University said that their goal is to increase the laser output to 10 petawatts, as the competition to improve the performance of lasers in the world is heating up.
Popular Science claims that a 50,000 watt laser was capable of taking down a drone at just a mile away from it. However, the 50,000 watt laser was said to be less powerful than the one used in Japan by 10 billion times. Until now, a laser created by the University of Texas in Austin with a power of 1 petawatt was the only truly powerful laser the world has seen.
Scientific American reported that lasers are fundamentally just incredibly powerful lights with incredibly concentrated power. A number of pulse sessions are able to destroy remarkably hard materials such as diamond or titanium. The powerful laser in Japan could also become an extremely powerful weapon and people have already compared the laser recently fired in Osaka to the popular Death Star seen in “Star Wars”.
However, there is some good news regarding the new laser developed in Japan. It was developed to progress the scientific interest instead of having a purpose in the real world, said the scientists responsible for its development.
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