• Question: How powerful is the most powerful laser you have ever used?

    Asked by yasrockangels to Mike, Pip, Tianfu, Tim, Tom on 2 Jul 2012. This question was also asked by lordofdeadspace2.
    • Photo: Tim Stephens

      Tim Stephens answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      The most powerful laser that I’ve ever used is a pulsed one for taking pictures of very fast flows.
      That laser makes 200mJ pulses that last only 10ns (1/100,000,000 of a second). Whilst 200mJ might not sound like a lot of energy, it’s equivalent to 20Megawatts of power (although only for a tiny fraction of a second). To put 20MW into perspective, it’s about the amount of power consumed by 900 houses.

    • Photo: Tom Lister

      Tom Lister answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      We once worked out that one of our lasers uses about 10 percent of the energy coming out of our nearest power station, but like Tim’s one, it is only on for a very short time (the energy is built up in the laser unit over a few seconds before all being discharged at once).

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