Who doesn’t love lasers? You can be annoying at the movies with it, attach them to the heads of sharks and obtain fusion with it. Sadly it seems that the scientists over at Rochester University are only interested in the last prospect, but it’s still pretty neat.

According to a press-release from the University of Rochester, they now have a laser capable of focusing a petawatt of power, onto a target only a millimeter wide. Now the prefix Peta isn’t something we get to use often, as it’s a HUGE number, we’re not even close to measuring harddrives in that range yet, we’re barely up to terabytes there,, but Peta(bytes) comes right after that. So that’s 1.000.000.000.000.000 Watts of power output. In comparison, a normal red laser pointer typically has the power output on the order of milli-watts (0.001 Watts).

Now for me, just being able to throw those numbers around would be reason enough to build the laser, but it’s actually got practical use. It’s purpose is to try out a new concept known as fast-igntion fusion, that offers much more energy efficient way of obtaining fusion. Fusion has long been a holy-grail of sorts in the energy sector, as it would create no enviromently unfriendly gases, and much less radioactive waste compared to nuclear reactors (that work on using the concept of Fission (splitting atoms)). Although fusion has been done before, it has never been done in a way where you actually get more energy out then you put in (correct me if i’m wrong), and the fast-ignition scheme of achieving fusion is one suggestion to make it more economically viable.

Here’s a short article on fusion, explaining both the shortcomings of traditional fusion, and how the fast-ignition scheme might improve it.