July 20, 2012—On this night the BELLA laser system delivered a petawatt of power in a pulse just 40 femtoseconds long at a pulse rate of one hertz—one pulse every second. A petawatt is 1015 watts, a quadrillion watts, and a femtosecond is 10-15 second, a quadrillionth of a second. No other laser system has achieved this peak power at this rapid pulse rate. For further information, see the LBNL press release and this Scientific American news item.
BELLA Laser achieves world record power at one pulse per second
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