{"id":87442,"date":"2019-02-06T08:03:13","date_gmt":"2019-02-06T16:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/this-2000-trillion-watt-laser-could-re-create-the-big-bang-and-make-clean-energy"},"modified":"2019-02-06T08:03:13","modified_gmt":"2019-02-06T16:03:13","slug":"this-2000-trillion-watt-laser-could-re-create-the-big-bang-and-make-clean-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/this-2000-trillion-watt-laser-could-re-create-the-big-bang-and-make-clean-energy","title":{"rendered":"This 2,000 trillion watt laser could re-create the Big Bang\u2013and make clean energy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/this-2000-trillion-watt-laser-could-re-create-the-big-bang-and-make-clean-energy2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The most powerful laser beam ever created has been recently fired at Osaka University in Japan, where the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/pub_releases\/2015-08\/ou-wpl080615.php\">Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments <\/a>(LFEX) has been boosted to produce a beam with a peak power of 2,000 trillion watts\u2014two petawatts\u2014for an incredibly short duration, approximately a trillionth of a second or one picosecond.<\/p>\n<p>Values this large are difficult to grasp, but we can think of it as a billion times more powerful than a typical stadium floodlight or as the overall power of all of the sun\u2019s solar energy that falls on London. Imagine focusing all that solar power onto a surface as wide as a human hair for the duration of a trillionth of a second: that\u2019s essentially the LFEX laser.<\/p>\n<p>LFEX is only one of a series of ultra-high power lasers that are being built across the world, ranging from the gigantic 192-beam <a href=\"https:\/\/lasers.llnl.gov\/\">National Ignition Facility<\/a> in California, to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibs.re.kr\/eng\/sub02_03_05.do?gubunCode=corels_en\">CoReLS laser<\/a> in South Korea, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.clf.stfc.ac.uk\/CLF\/\">Vulcan laser<\/a> at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory outside Oxford, UK, to mention but a few.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/qz.com\/479500\/this-2000-trillion-watt-laser-could-re-create-the-big-bang-and-make-clean-energy\/\">https:\/\/qz.com\/479500\/this-2000-trillion-watt-laser-could-re...an-energy\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most powerful laser beam ever created has been recently fired at Osaka University in Japan, where the Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments (LFEX) has been boosted to produce a beam with a peak power of 2,000 trillion watts\u2014two petawatts\u2014for an incredibly short duration, approximately a trillionth of a second or one picosecond. Values this [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1633,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-solar-power","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87442","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\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}