• Question: how much energy does laser give out?

    Asked by ishy05 to Philip on 20 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Philip Dolan

      Philip Dolan answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Lasers can give out varying amounts of energy, depending on what kind they are. Some of the worlds most powerful lasers are used in nuclear fusion experiments (in fact they use loads, 92 or so and shoot them all at the same spot!) and I think the US Navy has managed to build a laser they shoot at other ships, and that one’s pretty powerful. Sometimes what you want is a very very short pulse of laser power too, and that’s an active area of research.

Comments

  • Photo: Ceri

    Ceri commented on :

    hey ishy05, hope you don’t mind me butting in. just thought i could add something to philip’s answer:

    the most energetic lasers in the world at the moment are in america at a laser fusion project called the National Ignition Facility, they have 192 lasers beams that have a combined energy of over a mega joule (MJ), that’s a thousand kilo joules, which is an immense amount of energy to be delivered in a billionth of a second.

    At the Central Laser Facility, our most energetic laser pulse delivers up to 500 J onto the target (0.5 kJ) and that’s quite typical for laser plasma research labs.

  • Photo: flower123

    flower123 commented on :

    congratulation