Record Breaking 500 Trillion Watts Laser Shot Delivered

The United States National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has successfully fired the most powerful laser beam ever recorded.

They have fired the world's most powerful laser, which blasts out a whopping 500 trillion watts of peak power and 1.85 mega joules ( MJ) of ultra violet laser light to its target.  That's 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time and 100 times more energy than any other laser regularly produces today.

The shot validated NIF's most challenging laser performance specifications set in the late 1990s when scientists were planning the world's most energetic laser facility. Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics' grand challenges -- igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target.

"NIF is becoming everything scientists planned when it was conceived over two decades ago," NIF Director Edward Moses said. "It is fully operational, and scientists are taking important steps toward achieving ignition and providing experimental access to user communities for national security, basic science and the quest for clean fusion energy."

Dr. Richard Petrasso, senior research scientist and division head of high energy density physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said, "The 500 TW shot is an extraordinary accomplishment by the NIF Team, creating unprecedented conditions in the laboratory that hitherto only existed deep in stellar interiors. For scientists across the nation and the world who, like ourselves, are actively pursuing fundamental science under extreme conditions and the goal of laboratory fusion ignition, this is a remarkable and exciting achievement."

"Already the most incredibly tightly controlled and most energetic laser in the world, it is remarkable that NIF has achieved the 500 TW milestones quite a significant achievement," said Dr. Raymond Jeanloz, professor of astronomy and earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley. "This breakthrough will give us incredible new opportunities in studying materials at extreme conditions."

The experiment that took place on July 5 was the third experiment in which total energy exceeded 1.8MJ on the target. It was then they received the highest energy laser shot ever fired with more than 1.89 MJ delivered to the target at a peak power of 423 TW. A shot on March 15 set the stage for the July 5 experiment by delivering 1.8 MJ for the first time with a peak power of 411 TW.

NIF is influencing the design of new giant laser facilities being built or planned in the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Japan and China.