{"id":235607,"date":"2026-04-20T22:32:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T03:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/ive-fired-one-of-americas-most-powerful-lasers-heres-what-a-shot-day-looks-like"},"modified":"2026-04-20T22:32:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T03:32:17","slug":"ive-fired-one-of-americas-most-powerful-lasers-heres-what-a-shot-day-looks-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/ive-fired-one-of-americas-most-powerful-lasers-heres-what-a-shot-day-looks-like","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve fired one of America\u2019s most powerful lasers\u2014here\u2019s what a shot day looks like"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ive-fired-one-of-americas-most-powerful-lasers-heres-what-a-shot-day-looks-like.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you walk across the open yard in front of the Physics, Math and Astronomy building at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.utexas.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\">University of Texas at Austin<\/a>, you\u2019ll see a 17-story tower and a huge L-shaped building. What you won\u2019t see is what\u2019s underneath you. Two floors below ground, behind heavy double doors stamped with a logo that most students have never noticed, sits one of the most powerful lasers in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>I was the lead laser scientist on the <a href=\"https:\/\/texaspetawatt.ph.utexas.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\">Texas Petawatt<\/a>, or TPW as we called it, from 2020 to 2024. Texas Petawatt, which is currently closed due to funding cuts, was a government-funded research center where scientists from across the country applied for time to use specialized equipment. It was part of <a href=\"https:\/\/lasernetus.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">LaserNetUS<\/a>, a Department of Energy network of high-power laser labs.<\/p>\n<p>This type of laser takes a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2024-03-romania-center-explores-world-powerful.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">tiny pulse of light<\/a>, stretches it out so it doesn\u2019t blast optics to pieces, and amplifies it until, for a brief instant, it carries more power than the entire U.S. electrical grid. Then it compresses the pulse back to a trillionth of a second to create a star in a vacuum chamber.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you walk across the open yard in front of the Physics, Math and Astronomy building at the University of Texas at Austin, you\u2019ll see a 17-story tower and a huge L-shaped building. What you won\u2019t see is what\u2019s underneath you. Two floors below ground, behind heavy double doors stamped with a logo that most [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,1490,2229,219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-government","category-mathematics","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}