A new way to make ultra powerful lasers

[John Clark]

Using current techniques the power of a laser is limited because of the damage intense power can cause to the optical elements in the laser. In a new paper a method has been found to overcome this limitation by making the optical elements, not out of glass or diamond or sapphire but, out of plasma; a laser built using this technique could produce laser pulses with power a million times more intense than anything we have today and well into the Exawatt range. The authors propose building a laser with 90% efficiency that can produce light pulses with a duration of 2.2*10^-14 seconds with the power of one Exawatt. The power generating capacity of the entire U.S. electrical grid is about one Terawatt or 10^12 watts, a Exawatt is 1 million times greater than that or 10^18  watts.

Plasma Transmission Gratings for Compression of High-Intensity Laser Pulses

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[Lawrence Crowell]

HG Well's heat ray is made real. When Townes was asked if this new LASER could be a weapon he poopooed the idea and said you might as well drop it from an airplane onto a target. Now 60 years later we are seeing the rise of weaponized lasers.

LC 

[Brent Meeker]

But it sounds like it just achieves high power by taking ordinary energy pulses and compressing them in time.

Brent

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 2:33 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> But it sounds like it just achieves high power by taking ordinary energy pulses and compressing them in time.

Well yes, increasing the output energy more than the input energy would violate the laws of physics, but increasing the power would not.  This could do more than just make new weapons, it could increase the possibility of controlled nuclear fusion by means of inertial confinement; and to get it going and ignite a deuterium tritium pellet you have to put a huge amount of energy into a short burst, and the shorter the better.

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 2:44 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well yes, increasing the output energy more than the input energy would violate the laws of physics, but increasing the power would not.  This could do more than just make new weapons, it could increase the possibility of controlled nuclear fusion by means of inertial confinement; and to get it going and ignite a deuterium tritium pellet you have to put a huge amount of energy into a short burst, and the shorter the better.

And if you've got a laser with 90% efficiency and you don't have to worry about damaging the optical components (and if they're made of plasma you don't) then the number of super short laser pulses you produce each second is limited only by the electrical power supply feeding the laser. There's no reason you couldn't hook it up to Hoover Dam, and 90% of the electrical energy it produced would go into the light energy of the output beam of the laser.

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[Brent Meeker]

On 9/13/2022 4:25 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 2:44 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well yes, increasing the output energy more than the input energy would violate the laws of physics, but increasing the power would not.  This could do more than just make new weapons, it could increase the possibility of controlled nuclear fusion by means of inertial confinement; and to get it going and ignite a deuterium tritium pellet you have to put a huge amount of energy into a short burst, and the shorter the better.

And if you've got a laser with 90% efficiency and you don't have to worry about damaging the optical components (and if they're made of plasma you don't) then the number of super short laser pulses you produce each second is limited only by the electrical power supply feeding the laser.

I doubt that.  To lase the atoms need to be pumped up to excited states, which takes time.  I see nothing in the paper about increasing the pulse rate.  It's just about decreasing the pulse duration.  So the average power stays the same even though the peak power goes up many orders of magnitude.  In his numerical example he refers to the current non-plasma limit being 2e12 W/cm^2 and a energy flux of 4 J/cm^2.  So it's the 4 J/cm^2 that's your heat ray.  The fact that he can be 5e17 W/cm^2 comes from compressing the pulse, not making them more frequent.

Brent

There's no reason you couldn't hook it up to Hoover Dam, and 90% of the electrical energy it produced would go into the light energy of the output beam of the laser.

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2022 at 8:19 AM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> And if you've got a laser with 90% efficiency and you don't have to worry about damaging the optical components (and if they're made of plasma you don't) then the number of super short laser pulses you produce each second is limited only by the electrical power supply feeding the laser.

> I doubt that.  To lase the atoms need to be pumped up to excited states, which takes time. 

Sure it takes time but not much time, things happen fast when you get down to the atomic scale. Back in 2018 they made a laser that could pulse 30 billion times a second, and back then they had to worry about damaging the optical components because they used old-fashioned glass not plasma. Potentially there is no reason you couldn't pulse a lot faster than that.

Ultrafast electro-optic light with subcycle control

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[Lawrence Crowell]

This appears really to not so much about making a high-power laser as it is with optical components that work with such light.

LC

On Sunday, September 11, 2022 at 6:56:06 AM UTC-5 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:

[John Clark]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2022 at 6:44 PM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> This appears really to not so much about making a high-power laser as it is with optical components that work with such light.

Yes but it does show there's no physical reason a laser can't pulse extremely rapidly. 

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