July 2001 - Nr. 7
Jena Institute to Produce Superlaser
TWIG - A team of scientists at the Institute for Optics and Quantum Electronics in Jena is developing one of the world’s strongest lasers. The group is building an instrument capable of producing a beam of one petawatt (a quadrillion watts), making it ten times more intense than the most powerful lasers in use today. The director of the project, Roland Sauerbrey, says they hope to have the new machine up and running within the next four years.
The device will use the combined power of 4,500 parallel laser diodes, each of which will be about 100,000 times as strong as the laser used in a household CD player, says Sauerbrey. The diodes were custom-made for the project by the optics firm Jenoptik AG, which ultimately plans to put them on the world market. The diodes’ energy is stored in a special laser medium and emitted in ultra-short blasts of about 150 quadrillionths of a second.
The petawatt laser is expected to fill a laboratory of about 2,000 square feet, which makes it relatively compact for a high-performance laser. Such instruments can sometimes be as large as a football field, says Sauerbrey. The superlaser will be used to produce radioisotopes for medical radiation diagnostics and therapy. It might also have the power to transform hazardous substances such as nuclear waste into less harmful variants.
