Great VID of NIF Fusion lasers

[Curiously_Coherent]

Hey folks,

Just watched this kewl animated video of the laser array at the National Ignition Facility in the UK. Pretty amazing as it takes you down the beam path, through all the amplifiers before conversion to UV at 500 trillion watts for 20 billionths of a second. (!) They hope to create small stars and, of course fusion. Whether this is enough power to be sustainable and give a net gain remains to be seen. But what a freakin' bank of lasers!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7973111.stm

EDIT: Here's the article thread which has much more info:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8044620.stm
:lasergun:
Cheers, CC

 

[Switch]

That's cool how they amplify the beams with flashlamps I wonder what the power loss through all those optics and the frequency tripling(?) at the end is?

 

[Curiously_Coherent]

Yeah,

And can you imagine the optics required to focus 192 lasers all on the same pea-size point in space? Mind boggling... in all respects.

CC

 

[Cyparagon]

The length of the beams of light according to speed × duration (contrary to what the video shows) would only be 2cm long! That's ridiculous! :thinking:

 

[Switch]

The length of the beams of light according to speed × duration (contrary to what the video shows) would only be 2cm long! That's ridiculous! :thinking:

Yea, cause every time you turn on your greenie you see a beam strech as far as you can see. Those 2cm beams would probably escape between the frames of your eye if they were made visible

 

[Cyparagon]

The eye doesn't really have a set FPS reading. We just can't tell the difference between 100hz and 1khz and 10khz. A 20ns pulse would probably look identical to a 20µs pulse. you would still see a long beam, but for the same reason you can see a circle from a scanner or spirograph.

 

[Switch]

You're probably right.I was just thinking that there is a tiny break between the frames.