Construction planned for super-laser more powerful than the Sun
From cat toys to Blu-Ray players, we humans like our lasers, but a new
crazy-powerful laser
under construction in the Czech Republic will have even the likes of
Dr. Evil turning red with jealousy. The Extreme Light Infrastructure
(ELI) Beamlines project is an EU-funded lab that astrophysicists and
evil masterminds alike will covet the world over.
Due to be switched on by 2017, ELI Beamlines will construct a
laser
called the High-Repetition-Rate Advanced Petawatt Laser System (HAPLS).
This bad boy will emit a short laser burst with an intensity of 10
23
watts per square centimeter. That's 100,000 times more power than all
the power stations in the world can put out — combined. It's as if all
the energy of the Sun were focused into a single beam about as big as
coaster.
These
laser bursts will last only 1/100,000th of a billionth of a second.
Still, within that short time they'll afford researchers unprecedented
access to the workings of the
cosmos.
Through the ELI Beamlines project, we could emulate the radiation given
off by pulsars or learn how matter behaves within brown dwarf stars and
massive exoplanets. Just don't go standing in the way of a blast from
the HAPLS once it's ready to fire, or you might find out just what
Shakespeare meant when he wrote "...the white-hot heat of a thousand
suns."
ELI Beamlines, via
Science and Technology Review
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