Ripping the Universe a new hole with a mirror & laser.

Steve001

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From Arstechnica via Physical Review Letters.

"On average, the amount of power used by humans is about 18 terawatts. A petawatt is 1,000 times larger than a terawatt. The baddest laser on the planet (currently) produces somewhere between 5 and 10 petawatts, and there are plans on the drawing board to reach 100 petawatts in the near future. The trick is that the power is not available all the time. Each of these lasers produces somewhere between 5-5000 J of energy for a very, very short time (between a picosecond—10-12s—and a few femtoseconds—10-15s). During that instant, however, the power flow is immense..."https://arstechnica.com/science/201...h-laser-pulse-through-fabric-of-the-universe/
 
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The idea seems to be to use a laser as something similar to a particle accelerator? Not sure how the energy levels in this compare to the LHC, but seems like a cool idea.
 
Normally in English when list timescales we go from shorter to longer, "I'll be away for a few days, maybe a wee.", "An egg should be boiled for 4-7 minutes."

I find the reversal strangely disconcerting.
 
The initial challenge was to get the pulses short, and so we were able to get to femtosecond pulses with a Ti:Sapphire system. Nowadays, pulses can be sub-femtosecond. But then the challenge is to get the energy up. Early Ti:Saphs had micro-joules per pulse. Getting that up to 5 J/pulse is smoking pretty good. The ways to increase the energy are to get more photons in the pulse and/or increase the energies of the photons that are there. So instead of having ultrafast pulses in the IR, you get them down to the x-ray level. That's a huge increase in energy for the same number of photons.

5 J in a 1 fs pulse is a crazy high power.
 
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A light pulse of 3 femtoseconds duration is about 1 micron in length. It's not a beam, it's a sheet. It would seem the hard part is focusing it onto a small area. If you could focus it to the size of a particle, it would be kind of like an artificial cosmic ray.

(I recall years ago, the lasers being developed for inertial confinement fusion produced a pulse about 200 picoseconds long, in an optical channel about 30 cm in diameter—approximately the shape and dimensions of a thrown pie.)
 
theprestige said:
Doesn't even make a hole in the universe. Sensationalist crap.
Click to expand...

That's a good thing. If it really did make a hole in the universe, the scientist's mad duplicate from another universe would try to destroy both universes, and the Enterprise would have to blow up the laser to seal off the hole with both of the duplicate scientists inside to prevent that.

At least, that's what a documentary I first watched in the '60's leads me to believe.
 
theprestige said:
Doesn't even make a hole in the universe. Sensationalist crap.
Click to expand...


In all honesty, I would prefer a more clickbaity title. Laser Tears Universe a New One!!! Afterall, we ARE trying to actively encourage new members.


Hearts and minds ....
 
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