Computing Science
Magazine
September-October 2010
September-October 2010
Volume: 98 Number: 5
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California is a 192-beam laser that can produce 500 trillion watts of power in pulses that last 20 billionths of a second. Inside NIF's target chamber, the focused pulses will heat and compress a capsule, causing nuclear fusion, for the purpose of energy and astrophysical research. With this year heralding the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser, physicist Todd Ditmire recounts in "High-power Lasers" the technological advances that have taken lasers from their first modest beams to the immense operations such as NIF that exist today. By compressing beams to minuscule durations, physicists can boost a pulse's peak power to more than the entire output of the United States electrical grid, if only for a tiny fraction of a second. Scientists are now aiming to push the power of lasers to even higher levels in the near future.
In This Issue
- Astronomy
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Communications
- Computer
- Engineering
- Environment
- Ethics
- Evolution
- Medicine
- Physics
- Policy
- Psychology
- Sociology
- Technology
High-power Lasers
Todd Ditmire
Physics Technology
The invention of the laser 50 years ago has led to the latest generation of devices, with power bursts thousands of times that of the nation’s entire electrical grid
A Bigger, Better Brain
Craig Stanford, Maddalena Bearzi
Psychology
Observations of chimpanzees and dolphins strengthen the notion that humanlike intelligence may not be uniquely human
Gifts and Perils of Landslides
Kenneth Hewitt
Anthropology Physics
Catastrophic rockslides and related landscape developments are an integral part of human settlement along upper Indus streams
