How powerful is the NIF laser?
How powerful is the NIF laser?
NIF’s 192 powerful laser beams, housed in a 10-story building the size of 3 football fields, can deliver nearly 2 million joules of ultraviolet laser energy in billionth-of-a- second pulses to the target chamber center.
How does a NIF laser work?
As with most large lasers, NIF uses intense flashes of white light from giant flashlamps to “pump” electrons in large slabs of laser glass to a higher-energy state that lasts only about one-millionth of a second. A small pulse of laser light “tuned” to the excited electrons’ energy is directed through the glass slabs.
How big is the NIF laser?
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the largest construction project ever undertaken at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). NIF consists of 192 forty-centimeter-square laser beams and a 10-m-diameter target chamber.
Does the NIF work?
In 2021, after many years of research in fuel target design, NIF produced 70% of the energy of the laser, beating the record set in 1997 by the JET reactor at 67% and achieved a burning plasma.
How powerful is NIF?
NIF’s 192 powerful laser beams, housed in a 10-story building the size of 3 football fields, can deliver more than 2 million joules of ultraviolet laser energy in billionth-of-a-second pulses onto a target about the size of a pencil eraser.
Did the NIF laser work?
America’s National Ignition Facility measured a record of 70% conversion in their laser fusion experiments. For a brief moment the fusion was self-sustaining. A moment that excites people around the globe.
How much does NIF cost?
about $3.5 billion
How much did NIF cost? The total cost for NIF including development, vendors, capital, installation, and commissioning was about $3.5 billion.
What kind of experiment is done at NIF?
The experiment was enabled by focusing laser light from NIF — the size of three football fields — onto a target the size of a BB that produces a hot-spot the diameter of a human hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second.
Did NIF ever work?
What does NIF stand for?
NIF
Acronym | Definition |
---|---|
NIF | Network Information File |
NIF | Neighborhood Information Frame |
NIF | National Innovation Foundation (India) |
NIF | National Issues Forum (various locations) |
How much power does NIF use?
How much power and energy do NIF’s 192 beams produce? On July 5, 2012, NIF made history when its 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet (UV) laser light to its target.
What is the purpose of NIF?
NIF’s mission is to achieve fusion ignition with high energy gain, and to support nuclear weapon maintenance and design by studying the behavior of matter under the conditions found within nuclear weapons. NIF is the largest and most energetic ICF device built to date, and the largest laser in the world.