Japan Fires World's Most Powerful Laser

Japan Just Fired a 2 quadrillion watt-laser And It's Just The Beginning
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Scientists at Osaka University in Japan say they've fired the world's most powerful laser -- that's 2-petawatts or two quadrillion watts (2,000,000,000,000,000 watts).

Let's just stop and put this context first. According to Popular Science, a 50,000 watt laser successfully took down a drone a mile away.

So far, the world has only ever had a 1-pettawatt laser and it belongs to the University of Texas, Austin.

Japan's laser is called Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments (LFEX) and is 300ft long.

While its power output is incredibly high, scientists say it uses very little energy to operate.

Osaka University are yet to release any video of the mega-powerful laser in action. Perhaps, they're waiting for the next stages of the research to be complete.

Junji Kawanaka, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the university said: With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts."

Details of the experiment have been published in the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion