Texans Build World's Most Powerful Laser

(wired) -- Scientists have switched on the world's most powerful laser, which for one-trillionth of a second is 2,000 times more powerful than all the power plants in the United States. The laser's output tops a petawatt, which is a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) watts of power.

In the basement of the physics building at the University of Texas at Austin, the school's High Intensity Laser Science Group built a petawatt laser in hopes of recreating astronomical phenomena like supernovae in miniature.

"We can put materials into states that you can't access here on earth," said Mikael Martinez, the laser project's manager. "You'd have to go out into space and hang out with an exploding star to observe what we plan to observe here in Texas.

"When the scientists turned on the laser on March 31, it became the world's most powerful operational laser, but it doesn't yet hold the record for the most powerful laser ever built. That honor, at least for a few more months, belongs to the now mothballed Nova laser built at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The Nova produced 1.25 petawatts of power when it was first switched on in 1996. Martinez said he expected his project to break that record within the year, reaching between 1.3 and 1.5 petawatts. full story