ZEUS – A new two-petawatt laser facility at the University of Michigan

> Optical devices called diffraction gratings stretch it out in time so that when the pump lasers dump power into the pulse, it doesn’t get so intense that it starts tearing the air apart.

Oh,my.

> "The crystal that we’re going to get in the summer will get us to 3 petawatts, and it took four and a half years to manufacture"

This entire thing is beyond cool. I hope the rest of the process goes smoothly for the teams involved!

I was hoping I could hear it make noise but it operates for millionths of nanoseconds. Human ears have trouble with anything less than 30 ms so when it runs a trillion times longer we’ll be able to hear it make a sound.

You can hear femtosecond lasers because they ionize the air, creating a spark. They buzz at the pulse repetition frequency.

Do you know how often this one pulses? I was getting the impression it fires once per hour given the power levels.

Big powerful lasers can actually be quite noisy. Once I was talking on the phone with a friend who was working on one of the big lasers (don't remember which one, but it was in the bay area) and he said,"What? What? I'm sorry I can't hear you over the sound of my laser!". When he could hear me, I told him that was one of the coolest things I'd ever heard anyone say.

It's usually the accessories and support equipment that makes lasers loud. Cooling equipment, electrical stuff, etc.

If those can be put in another room then the noise goes way down.