Exawatt Lasers? That's: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts worth of power. And we are close to achieving it. Could open up Laser fusion as a power source, and more powerful Laser Weapons.

Laser are getting ten times more powerful every 3 years, soon Exawatt lasers will unlock fusion and more | NextBigFuture.com

The International Committee for Ultrahigh Intensity Lasers provided a 56-page report on global ultrahigh power laser projects. Ultra-intense lasers are lasers with capabilities exceeding 10^19 Watts per square centimeter (10 quintillion watts per square centimeter). This community is rapidly increasing in size both in terms of capability and investment.

From article, (The International Committee for Ultrahigh Intensity Lasers provided a 56-page report on global ultrahigh power laser projects. Ultra-intense lasers are lasers with capabilities exceeding 10^19 Watts per square centimeter (10 quintillion watts per square centimeter). This community is rapidly increasing in size both in terms of capability and investment.

Ultra-intense lasers are lasers with capabilities exceeding 10^19 Watts per square centimeter (10 quintillion watts per square centimeter). This community is rapidly increasing in size both in terms of capability and investment. The cumulative laser power from all “ICUIL” qualifying lasers in 2010 was estimated to be ~11 PW. By present estimates this total will exceed 120 PW by 2018. Ultra-high intensity laser projects worldwide now total more than $4 billion in research investment and involve more than 1500 FTEs of technical staff.

 In 2015, we were at 2 petawatt lasers, now at 10 petawatts and soon 100 petawatts

In 2015, Japan fired a 2 petawatt laser and believe this could be a pathway to commercial nuclear fusion.

Ultrapowerful lasers have been increasing in power by 1000 times every ten years for the past forty years.

In 2017, ten petawatt lasers were fired.

The formulation for the glasses needed for exawatt lasers is known.

Liquid cooling can enable one shot per minute or better. There are other laser types that have lower power but very high repetition rates. One of many goals is to increase the power and increase the repetition rate.

Multi-petawatt power capability projects.
* Chinese initiative at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) is advancing towards a 10-PW laser facility
* 100 Petawatt Station for Extreme Light (SEL) at the proposed Shanghai Coherent Light Facility (SCLF).
* Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) activated their multi-kJ Advanced Radiographic Capability (ARC) PW scale laser and the PETAL laser at CEA began operations toward the 2-PW level in 2017.
* In South Korea, the Gwangju Institute for Science and Technology is presently commissioning a 4 PW capability that should be available to users in 2017.
* The University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics continues to work on the OPAL multi-phase laser initiative that could evolve from 5-PW to 75-PW capability.
* European ESFRI roadmap project, the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI), consisting of ELI-Beamlines (Czech Republic), ELI-Nuclear Physics (Romania), and ELI-ALPS (Hungary), is rapidly approaching initial operations.)

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