The World’s Most Powerful Laser Has Been Fired In Japan

As said by a recently published release, scientists at Osaka University in Japan have reportedly fired the world’s most powerful laser beam.

The team at the university’s Institute of Laser Engineering emitted a 2-petawatt, or 2 quadrillion-watt, laser beam using the huge “LFEX” (Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments).

All of that equipment is necessary to create what the team of engineers is calling the most powerful laser beam on Earth.

Don’t worry, the LFEX won’t be mounted onto a tank or truck anytime soon: the current chassis is now over 300 feet long and takes up an entire room on its own. The device amplifies the power of the beam by applying it to specialized lamps. At this point LFEX can only fire a brief pulse lasting a single pico-second – or one-trillionth of a second.

But lasers don’t require much energy for their short powerful bursts. To create the laser beam, researchers needed only a few hundred Joules – about the power required to run a few light bulbs or a microwave.

The laser, which was built at the end of last year, was successfully in achieving an incredible large energy output of a 2 petawatt, or 2 quadrillion-watt energy beam.

As mentioned by Junji Kawanaka, associate professor of electrical engineering at the university: ‘With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts.’.

As if one enormous laser wasn’t scary enough on its own, the LFEX isn’t even the first of its kind: while it’s not quite as powerful, the University of Texas is now working with its own petawatt laser system, appropriately named the Texas Petawatt.