I’m not sure about the laser from the article, but I know that the Extreme Light Infrastructure project has a few pretty strong lasers.
The L4 Aton in Romania produces a single, 1.5 kJ, 150 fs pulse every minute - so peak power is 10 PW (1500 / 150E-15), but 1.5 kJ over a full minute is only 25 watts.
ELI also has the 2 PW High Field (HF) Laser laser, in Szeged, Hungary. This one gets the 2 PW with a 10 Hz rep rate, 17 fs pulses.
My comment from cross post:
Sounds like it was a 2 petawatt pulsed laser, with picosecond pulses, so 2kJ/pulse. Staggering amount of power and energy for a pulsed laser!
Note that it’s not CW, so the average power will be much, much, much less than the pulsed power. Too lazy to find the rep rate to see average power.
I’m not sure about the laser from the article, but I know that the Extreme Light Infrastructure project has a few pretty strong lasers.
The L4 Aton in Romania produces a single, 1.5 kJ, 150 fs pulse every minute - so peak power is 10 PW (1500 / 150E-15), but 1.5 kJ over a full minute is only 25 watts.
ELI also has the 2 PW High Field (HF) Laser laser, in Szeged, Hungary. This one gets the 2 PW with a 10 Hz rep rate, 17 fs pulses.