World’s most powerful laser beam blasts out from Osaka

Scientists at Japan’s Osaka University recently fired what’s being called the world’s most powerful laser beam.

The team shot the two-quadrillion-watt laser using a huge 100-metre-long machine, relying on four sets of devices that amplify the power smaller lasers.

While incredibly impressive, it’s also worth pointing out that it fired that burst for an extremely short amount of time – just one picoseconds, or one-one trillionth of a second. And the interesting part is that while the LFEX boasts enormous power, it doesn’t actually require that much energy to operate. On July 27, researchers said that the power of the fired laser beam is equivalent to 1000 times of the electricity consumed by the entire world and thus it entered in the record books for most powerful laser beam.

Built at the end of last year, the team managed to achieve the mind-bogglingly large energy output of a 2 petawatt, or 2 quadrillion-watt energy beam which no doubt sounds terrifying, or awesome, depending on who you are talking to. The laser is able to generate so much power so quickly thanks to a series of glass “lamps” that amplified the laser as it passed through them. “With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts”, said the institute’s Junji Kawanaka, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the university. A couple of hundreds of joules compared to a million and half will make a serious difference on the energy bill. Unless it has any immediate military applications, it’s hard to see how this powerful laser will receive funding on the long term to reach full maturity.