And you thought you saw fireworks on the 4th of July!

The largest laser system in the world was turned on for a fraction of a second July 5, and it unleashed the most powerful laser blast in history -- besting a record set mere months earlier.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) -- a laser test facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. -- turned on its 192 laser beams for a scant instant the day after the nation celebrated its birth, unleashing a record-setting 1.85-megajoule blast into a target chamber that delivered more than 500 trillion watts of power.

Five hundred terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, the facility said.

Scientists celebrated the historic test, which created conditions in the laboratory that had previously only existed deep within the heart of a star.

'Scientists are taking important steps toward ... the quest for clean fusion energy.'

- NIF director Edward Moses

“For scientists across the nation and the world who, like ourselves, are actively pursuing fundamental science under extreme conditions ... this is a remarkable and exciting achievement,” said Dr. Richard Petrasso, senior research scientist and division head of high energy density physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The test bested a record set March 15, when NIF unleashed a record-setting 1.8-megajoule blast into a target chamber.

In the historic test, NIF's 192 lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target. Beyond its sheer power, the beam-to-beam uniformity was within 1 percent, making NIF not only the highest energy laser of its kind but the most precise and reproducible.

“NIF is becoming everything scientists planned when it was conceived over two decades ago,” NIF director Edward Moses said.


In fission, atoms are split and the massive energy released is captured. NIF aims for fusion, the ongoing energy process in the sun and other stars where hydrogen and helium nuclei are continually fusing and releasing enormous amounts of energy. In the ignition facility, beams of light converge on pellets of hydrogen isotopes to create a similar, though controlled, micro-explosion.

As the beams move through a series of amplifiers, their energy increases exponentially. From beginning to end, the beams' total energy grows from one-billionth of a joule to a potential high of four million joules, NIF said -- a factor of more than a quadrillion. 

And it all happens in about five millionths of a second.

Because the laser is on for the merest fraction of a second, it costs little to operate -- between $5 and $20 per blast, spokeswoman Lynda Seaver told in March, when an earlier test set the stage for the July 5 blast. 


“We have all the capability to make it happen in fiscal year 2012,” Moses told Nature.