Using current techniques the power of a laser is limited because of the damage intense power can cause to the optical elements in the laser. In a new paper a method has been found to overcome this limitation by making the optical elements, not out of glass or diamond or sapphire but, out of plasma; a laser built using this technique could produce laser pulses with power a million times more intense than anything we have today and well into the Exawatt range. The authors propose building a laser with 90% efficiency that can produce light pulses with a duration of 2.2*10^-14 seconds with the power of one Exawatt. The power generating capacity of the entire U.S. electrical grid is about one Terawatt or 10^12 watts, a Exawatt is 1 million times greater than that or 10^18 watts.
Plasma Transmission Gratings for Compression of High-Intensity Laser Pulses <https://journals.aps.org/prapplied/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.18.024026> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> upl -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2q5tTu2hTj7Q0di8izp8X_NQ7UQzTYrhSkY%2BwG-oUCgQ%40mail.gmail.com.
