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REMEMBER: WATT IS THE UNIT OF POWER By   Dave Gershgorn   Posted  Yesterday at 9:47pm The Asahi Shimbun The LFEX petawatt laser. Researchers at Osaka University  are claiming  to have fired the most powerful laser in the world. The 2-petawatt (two quadrillion watt) pulse lasted just one picosecond (a trillionth of a second). For a rough comparison, in 2013, a 50 kilowatt (50,000 watt) laser  shot down a drone two kilometers away . Osaka's mega-powerful laser is called  LFEX , or Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments, and measures more than 300 feet long. While two petawatts is a formidable amount of power, the idea of a petawatt laser isn’t new. The United States has a few of their own, notably a  one-petawatt laser  at the University of Texas at Austin. Michael Donovan, associate director for the Texas Petawatt, says that it’s important to remember when talking about lasers of this size that, while the power ...

The laser gun takes flight Truck-mounted IED-destroying lasers have already been tested in Iraq, but firing lasers from an airplane is a more difficult proposition. The first successful test of a plane-mounted laser gun came on August 7, when Boeing's 18-ton chemical laser fired a beam from a C-130H aircraft and destroyed a three-by-three-foot target on the ground. It was the first time all of the ATL's lab-tested pieces came together to vaporize a target. Why use a beam instead of a bomb? Precision strikes, with (theoretically) no collateral damage. The military hopes to deploy the system in the next five years. boeing.com Source: popular science