What is the Worlds Most Powerful Laser?
As of January 2009, the world’s most powerful laser is the Texas Petawatt Laser at the University of Texas in Austin, US. In March 2008, the laser became the first in the world to surpass the 1 petawatt (million billion watts) threshold, a quantity of power about 60 times greater than the world’s average energy consumption in 2004, which measured about 15 terawatts. The way that such tremendous power is attained is by only activating the laser for a very short amount of time, only one-tenth of a trillionth of a second. Though the total energy produced by the laser is small — about 200 joules, or similar to that burned by a light bulb in a couple seconds — it is released in such a minuscule portion of time that the power output per second (watts) is enormous. Being the most powerful laser on Earth, the Texas Petawatt Laser is used by scientists to reproduce exotic conditions never seen on Earth — like the interior or a supernova or the Sun. Experiments with the laser give scientists
