8 ms·
ZEUS – A new two-petawatt laser facility at the University of Michigan
- cnees 1y agoI got a tour of the lab during construction. As a software engineer, what I found most incredible about the project was how well they stuck to their delivery proposal and timeline over the course of five years of development.
- veunes 1y agoIt's a good reminder that behind every flashy breakthrough, there's a ton of careful planning and execution most people never see
- int0x29 1y ago[flagged]
- frollogaston 1y agoThis doesn't really have anything to do with the article
- lostlogin 1y agoThat university has made cuts due to Trump policies and the funding for that laser has come from The National Science Foundation, which has had its funding cut. https://theconversation.com/unprecedented-cuts-to-the-national-science-foundation-endanger-research-that-improves-economic-growth-national-security-and-your-life-256556 https://theconversation.com/unprecedented-cuts-to-the-nation...
- lurk2 1y ago[flagged]
- nashashmi 1y ago[flagged]
- lurk2 1y agoWhich scientists have been deported?
- peterlada 1y ago[flagged]
- frollogaston 1y agoUnlike some others here, I'm not saying this isn't happening, just that the comment doesn't belong here. Like you said, people have awareness, and there doesn't need to be a comment about science being at risk in the US on every science-related article (which is half of HN).
- nashashmi 1y agothe politics that surround institutions would still be relevant to this forum if the subject involves it. in this case, the NSF.
- nashashmi 1y agohttps://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5207343-dhs-denies-french-scientist-barred-entry-to-us-over-anti-trump-messages/ https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5207343-dhs-deni...
- lurk2 1y ago> “The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory — in violation of a non-disclosure agreement— something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal,” she wrote on social platform X, in response to a post from a French analyst. It’s possible that Tricia McLaughlin is just lying, but Philippe Baptiste’s comments come across as grandstanding: > “Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values that we will continue to proudly uphold,” he added. “I will defend the possibility for all French researchers to be faithful to them, in compliance with the law.” Do you have any other examples? Most of the stories I have read about researchers having trouble with immigration have involved Chinese nationals who frankly never should have been allowed near public research facilities in the first place.
- oldpersonintx2 1y ago[flagged]
- anoncow 1y agoI don't think it is. US is at risk of no longer being the right place to do research.
- perihelions 1y agoI can't steelman the position that "the topic of the article might disappear at any moment because of funding cuts" is unrelated to the article. If it were a post about a startup releasing a new product, and the top comment was "hey FYI, this startup has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy", would that be off-topic too? And: the article itself puffs about how this is attracting physics research to the US; how can contradicting claims the article makes be off-topic to discussion about self-same article? It can't be a "they're allowed to speak but we're not allowed to contradict"—this is HN! Discussion is the whole point!
- perihelions 1y agoThat's a howler of a line indeed, given the NSF was slashed >50% just weeks ago (the federal agency funding this physics research).
- whatshisface 1y agoThe president is refusing to spend over half of the money Congress has given to the NSF. (Justifications from those in the administration have focused on the fact that funding science supports their, quote, "ideological" enemies, universities.) In response, Congress has the right to make the NSF more independent, or to specify statutorily what the money has to be spent on. Under normal circumstances the fact that Congresspeople themselves were the ones who appropriated the funds would guarantee their support for seeing that their will was put into effect, but in these times there's no telling under what pressures they find themselves to abandon their positions. Technically the budget has not been cut, and there is enough time for Congress to rescue it - but only if they believe the interest of the responsible public outweighs the risk of being seen to defect from Trumpism that would face them in the upcoming primary election. Unlike the NIH situation, people are not directly dying from cancelled trials and perishables aren't being tossed out of refrigerators. There is still time to save American hard science from Trumpsim, if Congress could have a little pride and stand up for themselves. Otherwise the attack on our chemistry and physics laboratories will be a lot bigger than anything that has ever happened in a war.
- lurk2 1y agoWhich researchers have been deported?
- Jabbles 1y agohttps://archive.ph/w5yDx https://archive.ph/w5yDx
- lurk2 1y ago> In one, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was deported to Lebanon after trying to re-enter the United States with a valid visa. It was later reported that pictures on her phone had linked her with Hezbollah, which US authorities consider a foreign terrorist organization. This is the only example in the article.
- otteromkram 1y ago> Optical devices called diffraction gratings stretch it out in time so that when the pump lasers dump power into the pulse, it doesn’t get so intense that it starts tearing the air apart. Oh,my. > "The crystal that we’re going to get in the summer will get us to 3 petawatts, and it took four and a half years to manufacture" This entire thing is beyond cool. I hope the rest of the process goes smoothly for the teams involved!
- hinkley 1y agoI was hoping I could hear it make noise but it operates for millionths of nanoseconds. Human ears have trouble with anything less than 30 ms so when it runs a trillion times longer we’ll be able to hear it make a sound.
- mitthrowaway2 1y agoYou can hear femtosecond lasers because they ionize the air, creating a spark. They buzz at the pulse repetition frequency.
- hinkley 1y agoDo you know how often this one pulses? I was getting the impression it fires once per hour given the power levels.
- FiatLuxDave 1y agoBig powerful lasers can actually be quite noisy. Once I was talking on the phone with a friend who was working on one of the big lasers (don't remember which one, but it was in the bay area) and he said,"What? What? I'm sorry I can't hear you over the sound of my laser!". When he could hear me, I told him that was one of the coolest things I'd ever heard anyone say.
- chneu 1y agoIt's usually the accessories and support equipment that makes lasers loud. Cooling equipment, electrical stuff, etc. If those can be put in another room then the noise goes way down.
- ourmandave 1y agoMount it in a jet and you could pop an entire house full of popcorn in seconds.
- cnees 1y agoIn femtoseconds!
- hinkley 1y agoThat’s popcorn. Get it away from me, I can’t stand popcorn. I hate popcorn.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoMore for us, then!
- MisterTea 1y agoIt's an on topic movie quote: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/quotes/?item=qt0435723&ref_=ext_shr_lnk https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/quotes/?item=qt0435723&...
- amelius 1y agoPoint it downwards and make that hole through the center of Earth.
- tomcam 1y agoTwo Real Genius references on one page. Life is good.
- megous 1y agoI don't think anyone should be impressed by watts. Jouls are where all the real work is. Asside for the PR article. What's the use case for pettawatt laser pulse lasting 25 quintillionths of a second?
- cnees 1y agoA previous press release lists some research applications and potential practical developments. https://news.engin.umich.edu/2019/09/most-powerful-laser-in-the-us-to-be-built-at-michigan/ https://news.engin.umich.edu/2019/09/most-powerful-laser-in-...
- megous 1y agoThanks. :)
- hinkley 1y agoLaser pulses can ablate materials and the shorter the pulse the crisper the edges. Back in the 90’s or early 00’s they demonstrated pulses laser cutting of tissue where the heat damage to surrounding tissue had a width of a single cell.
- ourmandave 1y agoWhat, like a surgical laser? "Okay, hold really still..."
- hinkley 1y agoYeah and I think this and radiological tools are why chemo tattoos exist. The system has to react to the twitch you can’t control when a weird noise happens next to your head. Instead of stabbing bolts into your skull through your skin with a device Torquemada would have been proud of, they target versus the dots and if the dots move? Well this is where my knowledge runs out. Either they shut down the beam or they target in realtime. But either way the payload is delivered where it’s supposed to be or not at all. I don’t know if they are using laser scalpels in surgery. My medical fascination mostly ends at diagonostics and experimental procedures. If I don’t know anyone with a disorder I tend not to hear about new procedures. My friend in college was helping a prof work on picosecond violet lasers and now we are on femtosecond.
- spookie 1y agoFor anyone interested, the most powerful one is in Romania at the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) in Măgurele. It's about 10 petawatts.
- Alifatisk 1y agoIn that case, the titles claim is false, right?
- baxtr 1y agoInstead of petawatts I’d love to hear what it can destroy. I imagine a scale like: 1: Mosquito … 10000: Planet (Death Star)
- vlmutolo 1y agoTo kill a mosquito, you need "a few tens of millijoules, delivered within a few milliseconds" [0], so let's say 10W. To destroy the Earth (so that it turns into scattered dust and never reforms) you need about 10^32 J [1]; if we assume this is applied over maybe 100s, the laser would be 10^30W. So the log10 scale goes from 1–30, where mosquitos die at 1 and the Earth dies at 30. The 2 PW in the article is about a 15.3. The Vulcan 20-20 project (set to complete in 2029) will register at about 20PW, or a 16.3 on the mosquito-Death Star scale [2]. So on a log scale, we're over halfway to building the Death Star. [0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/backyard-star-wars https://spectrum.ieee.org/backyard-star-wars [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-energy-would-it-take-to-blow-the-earth-to-smithereens/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-energy-w... [2]: https://news.sky.com/story/worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-be-built-in-uk-and-will-be-million-billion-billion-times-brighter-than-the-sun-12970854 https://news.sky.com/story/worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-be-...
- jvanderbot 1y agoThank you for this, I will be using this for the rest of my life!
- amelius 1y agoNext question: on what planet/moon should the mosquito be to be _just_ safe from the laser?
- zahlman 1y agoWell, mass scales as the cube of radius, and we have 15 orders of magnitude to work with, so I guess it should be an object on the order of hundreds of meters in radius. But as noted, the duration of firing matters as well. Given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054239, the actual laser can only vaporize much smaller things.
- outadoc 1y agoWhat if we tried more power?
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoI'm assuming this is an XKCD reference. https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pryelluw 1y agoI am embarrassed to admit of thinking there’s a Family Guy joke somewhere in that headline.
- pugworthy 1y agoCould you explain the joke?
- SietrixDev 1y agoProbably Peta => Peter who is one of the main characters in the show.
- tonyhart7 1y agostar wars??? space wars???
- metalman 1y agochina is on track to have a 100pettawatt laser operating this year called "The Station of Extream Light", SEL for short, which is going to be used to try and seperate energy and matter by breaking empty space. think that this links to the place building it http://english.siom.cas.cn/Newsroom/rp/202207/t20220701_307101.html http://english.siom.cas.cn/Newsroom/rp/202207/t20220701_3071... all in all good to have a competitive environment in reseach.......though the US government, cough, cough, might, nudge, think about, some funding there
- zahlman 1y ago> Extream [sic]?
- torcete 1y agoIn this very interesting video, a Russian drone developer gives his thoughts about laser weapons. In theory they work, they test it always on ideal atmospheric conditions. In practice, they don't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM
- owenversteeg 1y agoI see a number of comments here misunderstanding the power of this laser. Laser facilities like this one are designed for incredibly short pulses that are femtoseconds long, and total energy per pulse is typically on the order of tens of joules, roughly equivalent to a few seconds of your phone flashlight. They can’t destroy much of anything on human scales. They are made to do physics research, and there is absolutely no pathway from a 2 petawatt laser that delivers a few joules a minute to a 2 petawatt laser that hits full output power for a few seconds: that would be 10^16 times more energy, and of course that brief pulse would use more electricity than all the US uses in a year and completely destroy the University of Michigan in spectacular fashion (very roughly equivalent to a five megaton nuclear explosion.) If you’re interested in the most energy per pulse, you want the “most energetic” laser, which is the NIF at LLNL. That’s about 2 megajoules per pulse or half a kilowatt hour. Definitely enough to kill a mosquito, but it doesn’t even register on the scale of Death Star style lasers from fiction. And if you want the most destructive power, those are all military lasers. Which can absolutely destroy things science fiction style, but on a fairly small scale and with some important limitations.
- babyent 1y agoSo.. We just need to figure out wormholes and make an infinite loop the laser goes through and harness its true power!!
- Dylan16807 1y agoI understand that you're being silly, but even in this silly theory land how is that supposed to work? While the laser is in a loop it's not hitting anything, and if you let it out it's the same as when you put it in.
- babyent 1y agoYou're right, I am being silly because I am too uneducated to really make sense of any of it. I love smart people who work on this stuff, a lot of what I take for granted is due to their efforts :)
- femto 1y agoHow's that compare to the peak power output of a bubble collapsing in a liquid, over similar timescales? A genuine question, as I know bubbles pack quite a punch (can cause fusion) but can't find any numbers.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThere's a Youtube channel looking for a low cost laser backstop material. They have 10-100?kW class single mode fiber lasers that can burn holes in almost anything Real Genius style. https://youtu.be/n3ssikDQva0 https://youtu.be/n3ssikDQva0
- neuroelectron 1y agoAh yes, this Large Pulsed Plasma Laser (LPPL) has a lot of interesting research potential.
- veunes 1y agoThe fact that this is an NSF user facility is hugely encouraging. It means ZEUS isn't just a trophy project, but a tool the broader scientific community can build on
- mppm 1y agoZeus would like to file an injunction against the impostors associating his name with a something-equivalent¹ something. The Zeus brand stands only for supreme dominance. Zeus would not object to an actual zettawatt laser being named after him.