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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peta-
peta P 1000^5 10^15 1000000000000000 quadrillion
http://www.news.com.au/technology/i...t/news-story/cd86c92518ae710046d300505e3dc192
China is building a laser 10 trillion times more intense than sunlight that could tear space apart
CHINESE researchers are working to develop a laser said to be 10,000 times the power of all the world’s electrical grids combined.
Sean Keach
The SunJanuary 29, 20188:32am
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CHINA is building a mega-laser that’s so powerful it could literally tear space apart.
Physicists in Shanghai are constructing what they call a “Station of Extreme Light”, which could be operational as soon as 2023.
The end goal is to create a laser so powerful it can produce 100 petawatt laser pulses — that’s 100 million billion watts.
For context, that’s 10,000 times the power of all the world’s electrical grids combined.
These ludicrously powerful pulses could be targeted at incredibly precise spots measuring just three micrometres across — that’s 2000 times less than the thickness of a standard pencil.
This means the researchers could achieve a laser intensity 10 trillion times greater than the sunlight striking Earth.
According to Science journal, this laser would be so powerful it “could rip apart empty space”.
The new laser will be known as the station of extreme light.Source:Supplied
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The idea is to achieve a phenomenon known as “breaking the vacuum”, whereby electrons are torn away from positrons (their antimatter counterparts) in the empty vacuum of space.
Right now, it’s possible to convert matter into huge amounts of heat and light, as proved by nuclear weapons. But reversing the process is more difficult — although Chinese physicist Ruxin Li believes his laser could manage it. “That would be very exciting. It would mean you could generate something from nothing,” he said.
The team has already created a less powerful version called the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser, which is capable of a 5.3 petawatt pulse.
If the new laser eventually becomes operational, it could give scientists a new way to accelerate particles for advanced physics research.
This article originally appeared on The Sun and is republished here with permission.
https://www.livescience.com/61562-laser-china-rip-vacuum-antimatter.html
Superpowered Chinese Lasers Could Soon Rip Open Raw Vacuum
By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | January 29, 2018 05:06pm ET
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Credit: Michal Steflovic | Shutterstock.com
Physicists are getting close to building lasers powerful enough to rip matter out of a vacuum.
According to a report published Jan. 24 in the journal Science, a team of Chinese scientists is getting ready to start construction this year on a 100-petawatt laser in Shanghai known as the Station of Extreme Light, or SEL. That puts them at the front of a wide field of scientists around the world who are working to realize a prediction published in the journal Physical Review Letters in 2010 by a team of American and French physicists that a sufficiently powerful laser could cause electrons to appear out of a vacuum.
It might seem weird to imagine that electrons could appear out of empty space. But it makes a lot more sense in light of a strange claim of quantum electrodynamics: "Empty" space isn't empty at all, but rather is made up of densely packed pairs of matter and antimatter. Those pairs tightly fill up the gaps between everything, quantum electrodynamics states — they just don't interact in any noticeable way with the rest of the universe, because they cancel one another out. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]
So it's easier to consider that the Chinese laser won't so much create matter, as cause it to enter the world humans can perceive. Its powerful pulses of energy will cause electrons to separate from their antimatter twins, positrons, in ways researchers can detect.
Building a laser powerful enough to do this, though, is a difficult (and expensive) technical challenge. One hundred petawatts, as Science reported, is about 10,000 times more energy than there is in all the world's electrical grids combined.
A smaller Chinese laser, the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility, could achieve 10 petawatts by the end of this year. (That's 1,000 times the power of all the world's grids.) So how can lasers reach these enormous power levels?
As the authors of the report in the journal Science explained, power is a function of two things: energy and time. Release a joule of energy over the course of 1 second, and that's 1 watt. Release a joule over the course of 1 hour, and that's just 0.28 milliwatts (28 hundred-thousandths of a watt). But release that joule in just 1-millionth of a second, and that's 1 million watts, or 1 megawatt.
All superpowered lasers rely in some way or another on releasing large amounts of energy over short periods of time, amplifying it and bending the beams such that all of that energy arrives at its target over the course of an even shorter period of time, the Science article reported.
By 2023, the SEL could strike targets just 3 micrometers (3-millionths of a meter, or the width of an E. coli bacterium) across with 100 petawatts of power, according to the report in Science.
For more technical details on how that laser would work, how other laser projects around the world compare and why the U.S. lags so far behind, check out Science's full report.
Originally published on Live Science.
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http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...-so-powerful-they-could-rip-apart-empty-space
A laser in Shanghai, China, has set power records yet fits on tabletops.
KAN ZHAN
Physicists are planning to build lasers so powerful they could rip apart empty space
By Edwin CartlidgeJan. 24, 2018 , 9:00 AM
Inside a cramped laboratory in Shanghai, China, physicist Ruxin Li and colleagues are breaking records with the most powerful pulses of light the world has ever seen. At the heart of their laser, called the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF), is a single cylinder of titanium-doped sapphire about the width of a Frisbee. After kindling light in the crystal and shunting it through a system of lenses and mirrors, the SULF distills it into pulses of mind-boggling power. In 2016, it achieved an unprecedented 5.3 million billion watts, or petawatts (PW). The lights in Shanghai do not dim each time the laser fires, however. Although the pulses are extraordinarily powerful, they are also infinitesimally brief, lasting less than a trillionth of a second. The researchers are now upgrading their laser and hope to beat their own record by the end of this year with a 10-PW shot, which would pack more than 1000 times the power of all the world's electrical grids combined.
The group's ambitions don't end there. This year, Li and colleagues intend to start building a 100-PW laser known as the Station of Extreme Light (SEL). By 2023, it could be flinging pulses into a chamber 20 meters underground, subjecting targets to extremes of temperature and pressure not normally found on Earth, a boon to astrophysicists and materials scientists alike. The laser could also power demonstrations of a new way to accelerate particles for use in medicine and high-energy physics. But most alluring, Li says, would be showing that light could tear electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, from empty space—a phenomenon known as "breaking the vacuum." It would be a striking illustration that matter and energy are interchangeable, as Albert Einstein's famous E=mc2 equation states. Although nuclear weapons attest to the conversion of matter into immense amounts of heat and light, doing the reverse is not so easy. But Li says the SEL is up to the task. "That would be very exciting," he says. "It would mean you could generate something from nothing."
The Chinese group is "definitely leading the way" to 100 PW, says Philip Bucksbaum, an atomic physicist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. But there is plenty of competition. In the next few years, 10-PW devices should switch on in Romania and the Czech Republic as part of Europe's Extreme Light Infrastructure, although the project recently put off its goal of building a 100-PW-scale device. Physicists in Russia have drawn up a design for a 180-PW laser known as the Exawatt Center for Extreme Light Studies (XCELS), while Japanese researchers have put forward proposals for a 30-PW device.
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Largely missing from the fray are U.S. scientists, who have fallen behind in the race to high powers, according to a study published last month by a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine group that was chaired by Bucksbaum. The study calls on the Department of Energy to plan for at least one high-power laser facility, and that gives hope to researchers at the University of Rochester in New York, who are developing plans for a 75-PW laser, the Optical Parametric Amplifier Line (OPAL). It would take advantage of beamlines at OMEGA-EP, one of the country's most powerful lasers. "The [Academies] report is encouraging," says Jonathan Zuegel, who heads the OPAL.
Invented in 1960, lasers use an external "pump," such as a flash lamp, to excite electrons within the atoms of a lasing material—usually a gas, crystal, or semiconductor. When one of these excited electrons falls back to its original state it emits a photon, which in turn stimulates another electron to emit a photon, and so on. Unlike the spreading beams of a flashlight, the photons in a laser emerge in a tightly packed stream at specific wavelengths.
Because power equals energy divided by time, there are basically two ways to maximize it: Either boost the energy of your laser, or shorten the duration of its pulses. In the 1970s, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California focused on the former, boosting laser energy by routing beams through additional lasing crystals made of glass doped with neodymium. Beams above a certain intensity, however, can damage the amplifiers. To avoid this, LLNL had to make the amplifiers ever larger, many tens of centimeters in diameter. But in 1983, Gerard Mourou, now at the École Polytechnique near Paris, and his colleagues made a breakthrough. He realized that a short laser pulse could be stretched in time—thereby making it less intense—by a diffraction grating that spreads the pulse into its component colors. After being safely amplified to higher energies, the light could be recompressed with a second grating. The end result: a more powerful pulse and an intact amplifier.
