Laser technology is reaching awesome power outputs

Laser technology is reaching awesome power outputs

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Researchers at the University of Osaka have built a 2-petawatt laser — that’s 2 quadrillion watts. This power is greater than today’s most powerful military lasers.

The Osaka laser system, called Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments, or LFEX, is not intended for military use, but that amount of power has clear military applications. Compare it to today’s cutting-edge military lasers, which include the 30-kilowatt Laser Weapons System currently mounted on the amphibious warship USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf. The LaWS has never been used in combat, but it took out several moving targets in a November demonstration.

According to Defense One ,In March, Lockheed Martin announced that they had demonstrated their own 30-kilowatt laser, the Advanced Test High Energy Asset, or ATHENA, which burned a hole in a car one mile downrange. In June, Germany’s MBDA Deutschland announced that their 40-kilowatt laser had knocked drones out of the sky nearly two miles away.

Lockheed is also working on a 60-kilowatt laser for the Army, and has said that 300-kilowatt laser, perhaps powerful enough to down a cruise missile, might be just three years away. Meanwhile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has funded research into a 150-kilowatt solid-state laser, aiming for a final product that’s “ten times smaller and lighter than current lasers of similar power” for use on planes and jets.

In terms of sheer power, the Osaka laser makes these look just pitiful. And it’s not even the first petawatt laser, nor the second. In 1996, Lawrence Livermore National Lab announced that they had “passed the petawatt threshold” with a laser called, straightforwardly, Petawatt. And until the Japanese breakthrough, the reigning king of lasers was the 1.1-petawatt Texas Petawatt Laser at the University of Texas at Austin, unveiled in 2008.

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