Death Star's Superlaser? World's Most Powerful Laser Just Fired in Japan

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Short Bytes : Japnese scientists claim to have built the world’s most powerful laser at 2 petawatts or 2 quadrillion watts of power, thus surpassing the previous record of 1 petawatt by the Unversity of Texas.

A team of researchers at Osaka University, Japan have claimed to fire the world’s most powerful laser ever. The experiment performed at the Institute of Laser Engineering emitted a tremendous 2 petawatt or 2 quadrillion -watts of power.

Now a laser beam that emits 2 petawatts sound like one hell of energy source has been designed, but the fact is the energy used to power the laser is same what your microwave uses for 2 seconds. So, the actual reason how the researchers could produce so much power is because the emittance was not a continuous process, but a pulse; how small- one trillionth of a second.

The researchers’ team used Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments (LFEX) to produce the world’s most powerful laser beam. LFEX utilizes four set of devices to concentrate and amplify the power of the laser. These were the optical mirrors or special ‘glass lamps’ that made the laser beam as powerful as 2 petawatts.

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An associate professor at the University, Junji Kawanaka said:

With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts

If somehow the laser was to be made a perpetual beam then it would use the energy roughly equivalent to 1,000 times of the world’s electricity consumption.

This is not the first time the deadly laser has been created. The University of Texas, Austin in the United States also boasts of a one-petawatt laser in its campus. Similarly, a German company has previously built a laser capable of emitting 50kW of power beam. Osaka-University-high output-LFEX