- Want to take a look at the beginning of time?
Fire the laser!
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Anyone who knows me, knows that I love lasers.
Maybe it's the haircut.
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Recently, a really interesting laser came online.
It's the Laser For Fast Ignition Experiments, or LFEx,
in Osaka, Japan.
It fires an incredible two pediwatt laser beam.
That's 2,000 trillion watts.
Holy cow, that's a big number.
I gotta give you some perspective on that.
Okay, in 2010, the entire world's population
used an estimated 16 terawatts of electricity.
It takes 1,000 terawatts to make 1 petawatt.
That means this laser's output represented more than
100 times the amount of electric power consumed
by the entire world in 2010.
Yikes!
Now, I don't mean to suggest every time they turn this laser
on, it sucks down all of our electricity.
It fires in very, very short bursts.
One trillionth of a second.
In other words, this unimaginably powerful laser fires
at unimaginably short intervals.
What would we use such a powerful laser for anyway?
Well, it's for science.
You can actually use this laser to vaporize matter
and generate plasma.
That's ionized gas and it makes up the majority
of all the observable matter in the universe.
That means we can use this for experiments in the lab
that recreate conditions that are really inhospitable.
Like the sun's atmosphere.
We can even use it to create conditions that are similar
to what was around just shortly after the big bang,
so that's pretty cool.
More importantly perhaps, this sort of laser can be used
to help ignite fusion reactions.
Fusion is how stars generate energy.
If we can harass that same process here on earth,
it would create an energy surplus all over the world,
and it doesn't create nasty nuclear waste either.
The problem with fusion reactions is that stars
have advantages.
There's enormous gravity and pressure and heat.
Here on Earth, if we wanna create conditions
that are favorable to fusion,
we have to pour a lot of energy into the system.
Lasers like this might play a part in a solution
to that problem.
Why stop there?
There are already plans at the University of Osaka
to build a 10 petawatt laser.
Five times more powerful.
Then, there's the Extreme Light Infrastructure's plan
to build a high intensity facility capable of firing
a laser with a peak power of 200 petawatts.
Now, this is not just a quest to build ever more powerful
lasers.
Lasers can be cheaper and more effective at creating
certain conditions that you might use
a particle accelerator for.
So, if you have an experiment that could use a laser
instead of a particle accelerator, it makes sense
to switch to a laser,
rather than using a facility that's several miles
in circumference.
It's a no brainer.
Plus, if we ever do crack that fusion problem,
the future will be so bright,
you better bet I'll be wearing shades.
Alright, I gotta question for you guys this week.
What future technology would you like us to tackle next?
I wanna hear it in the comments below.
Thanks to Toyota for sponsoring this show.
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