• Question: how do you handle the most powerful lasers in the world?

    Asked by Hunny to Chris on 23 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Chris Armstrong

      Chris Armstrong answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      Well, carefully.

      If we take Vulcan as the most powerful (I mean its close enough and will serve as an example) the laser itself is roughly the size of a warehouse. We have huge capacitor banks to generate the seed pulse, then several flash lamp amplifiers to increase the intensity of the pulse, before finally directing it into the laser chamber, where a compressor shrinks the pulse down to a picosecond in length (pulse is about 0.3mm in length) to further increase the intensity. Its then bounced around a few mirrors and focused down to a couple of microns onto the back of a metal target.

      I don’t even get to press the fire button in Vulcan. :'(

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