The US has a new most powerful laser
news.engin.umich.edu
Hitting 2 petawatts, the NSF-funded ZEUS facility at U-M enables research that could improve medicine, national security, materials science and more.
    • lemmeout@lemm.eeEnglish
      21·
      4 days ago

      It’s no different than an engine producing power. I think you are confusing it with “energy”.

  • PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    I have a decent grasp of physics but I understand nothing at all about this article. Melp me out, please?

    What use is a high energy beam that last for an almost immeasurably short period of time? How can it even be said that it has this power output, in such a short time?

    “Zero-POW!-zero” sounds unbelievable to normal humans. No ramp-up? No sizzling out?

    On such a short time scale, what’s the actual Wh used? It can’t be very much, so the actual energy delivered can hardly do anything at all, either.

    And finally, what’s even the point of this? What’s the purpose? What’s the end goal? Why?

    many possible applications, including better imaging methods for soft tissues and advancing the technology used to treat cancer

    I don’t see how that works out.

    Thank you for indulging me. I appreciate any responses.

    • semEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      The laws of physics are best understood at standard temperatures and pressures, where we have loads of data. To understand how physics works in more extreme circumstances, we have to create those circumstances and then measure what happens. At CERN, they accelerate particles very fast, smash them together, and record and analyze what happened. This is how they observed the Higgs boson and measured its properties.

      From the article, it looks like one of the experiments is to shoot the laser into an oncoming high speed beam of electrons. One of the things they’re looking for is if this high amount of energy causes matter and anti matter pairs to spontaneously form and annihilate. Our theories predict this but the more ways we can measure it the more we can learn, for instance about what happened right after the big bang, and why we were left with matter instead of everything annihilating symmetrically.