The most powerful tunable laser in the world just shattered another power record: the Free-Electron Laser (FEL), supported by the Office of Naval Research and located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), produced a 14.2 kilowatt (kW) beam of laser light at an infrared wavelength of 1.61 microns on October 30.
"This wavelength is of interest to the Navy for transmission of light through the maritime atmosphere and for material science applications," said Fred Dylla, Jefferson Lab's Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director of the Free-Electron Laser Division. The FEL is supported by the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Sea Systems Command, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Joint Technology Office, as well as by the Commonwealth of Virginia. The laser's new capabilities will enhance a wide range of applications, such as shipboard antimissile defense and other defense applications as well as manufacturing technologies and the support of scientific studies in chemistry, physics, biology and medicine.
This is another record for the powerful laser, which was also the first to achieve 10 kW in the infrared at 6 microns in July 2004. "In this case, the smaller the wavelength in the infrared, the more difficult it was to reach at these tremendously high powers," Dylla said. "Reaching 14 kilowatts at 1.61 microns is a truly remarkable achievement, and we couldn't have done it without the hard work and dedication of the FEL staff and our colleagues at Jefferson Lab. The team created groundbreaking designs that resolved technical challenges never before seen, since these power levels are unprecedented."
"This milestone supports the Navy's vision for the ultimate development of a very high power FEL that will serve as part of a ship-based weapon system and provide precise, speed-of-light energy projection at sea," added ONR program manager Lewis DeSandre. "The Navy and Department of Energy research communities continue to work on the steady development of FEL technology. The goal is to reach higher power levels that will provide persuasive evidence and support the eventual realization of FEL as a promising candidate for meeting several of the Navy's broad mission requirements and defeating 21st century threats."
"This achievement culminates an incredible effort by this dedicated team and my thanks and congratulations go out to the many physicists, engineers, technicians, and support staff members who have made this milestone possible," commented Jefferson Lab Director and JSA, LLC, President, Christoph Leemann.
The FEL program began as the One-Kilowatt Demonstration FEL, which broke power records and made its mark as the world's brightest high average power laser. It delivered 2.1 kW of infrared light--more than twice the level it was initially designed to achieve--before it was taken offline in November 2001 for an upgrade to 10 kW.
Built with Jefferson Lab's expertise in superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) technology, the FEL is the world's most powerful tunable laser. The FEL provides intense beams of laser light that can be tuned to a precise wavelength range in the infrared at higher-average powers than beams from conventional lasers.
An award-winning IST research team has developed highly unusual mini-robots, or swarm-bots, that work as a team to overcome challenges. While their cooperative behaviour is inspired by the actions of the tiny ant, their abilities could eventually take them to outer space.
Imitating insects such as ants, highly mobile small robots can accomplish physical tasks that no individual robot of the same size could manage. But if more sophisticated versions appear, then such machines could complete coordinated tasks in a way that could revolutionise the way we think about our world today.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg have visualised vibration and rotation in the nuclei of a hydrogen molecule as a quantum mechanical wave packet. What is more, this has been achieved on an extremely short spatio-temporal scale. They "photographed" the molecule using intensive, ultrashort laser pulses at different points in time and compiled a film from the separate images. This allowed them to visualise the quantum mechanical wave pattern of the vibrating and rotating molecule (Physical Review Letters, Online-Edition, November 6, 2006).
John Verkade remembers just how it happened some 40 years ago: One of his Iowa State University graduate students, David Hendricker, stopped by to report somebody was stealing a little wooden applicator stick from a beaker.
Oh, Verkade said, that's just a prank. Go hide around the corner and do some peeking until the joker shows up again. Thirty minutes later Hendricker was back in Verkade's office.
The Cybermedia Center (CMC) at Osaka University has purchased 20 SX-8R vector supercomputers from the NEC Corporation. The new system has a peak performance of 5.3 TFLOPS and will be the largest SX series system acquired in Japan.
CMC plans to add a next-generation SX system in two years, whose peak performance is expected to exceed 20 TFLOPS (one trillion floating-point operations per second), a performance enhancement of 16 times that of the current system of SX-5/12M8 (peak performance: 1,280GFLOPS).