Laser therapy FAQs
What is the National Ignition Facility?
The National Ignition Facility is an extremely large laser plant that is attempting to create fusion. The plant began at the end of the 20th century and was funded by the United States of America. The plant began construction in 1998 within the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, one of the most state of the art science centers in the world. The progress of the plant was fraught with problems and was delayed and over budget, but it concluded in 2009. Large scale testing of the facility is still being held to install shields that will block neutrons from leaving the 10 meter, 30 foot, target chamber as is common is a fusion reaction. The overarching goal of the NIF is to create a reaction, known as ignition, where a single large amount of energy is used to create a reaction that chain reacts at an even pace and results in more energy output that the amount of energy that went into the initial reaction. The plant uses literally thousands of xenon lamps to create the initial bursts of light that go through thousands of panes of glass to distill the beam to the optimal wavelength, through miles of piping, so that the beam can be split at the very end into 192 different directions that will evenly converge on a simply fuel pellet within the target chamber. The lasers will hit the pellet within a fraction of a fraction of a second. The energy will be converted to heat, and the surface should register 3.3 million Kelvin. The capsule’s outer layer will explode into plasma creating a concussive wave that races towards the center of the pellet. That blast will, hypothetically, create enough force to fuse the pellet together and create fusion. The NIF is proposing a first of its kind scientific breakthrough and should come into fusion test in the middle or late portion of 2010.
What is the Boeing YAL-747?
The Boeing YAL-1 is a modified 747 that was commissioned in the years following the September 11th, 2001. The purpose of this construction was to test the feasibility of a laser weapons system by the Air Force. The United States Air Force did successfully test the system in 2007 against a flying aircraft proving it could target a moving target and accommodate for atmospheric distorting. The fully weaponized laser, produced by Lockeed Martin, is affixed to the front of the 747 with a turret providing quick functioning turning and focusing. The beam is shot in a burst format that is meant to disable a missile in the booting phase of the deployment. The megawatt class laser can haul enough fuel in the fuselage to complete 20-40 shots depending on the intensity of the focus per shot. The Air Force has discontinued investment into the program because of a lack of feasibility since the 747 must be within a few hundred kilometers of the silo launch site and fire its shots within the first 10 seconds of flight, making the overall system highly complicated and extremely time sensitive. Regardless a small fleet of seven Yal-1 jets is planned to be produced, pending positive results from 2009 live tests.
What direction is the experimental world of lasers going?
X-Ray lasers are recently being proposed. Some groups have allegedly solved the problem by using the frequencies of two lasers hit each other for a miniscule amount of time to create a beam with the wavelength that can be termed a soft x-ray, that is one that cannot pierce the skin. Most interestingly, in the 1980s a thermonuclear device was detonated underground in Nevada in order to hypothetically power one of the lasers, but the results were inconclusive so the tests were discontinued. Under the 2nd Bush administration the project was revived under a different name to continue the work in other areas. The resultant rays feed into target chamber area where the science actually takes place. Harvard scientists are collaborating on a project to create an actual hard x-ray laser, but it is still a few years from functional. The potential output for this laser is greater than the entire National Ignition Facility, if it can be functionally brought online. It would be able to quickly top the 1.2 mega joule output of the NIF and become the world most powerful laser quickly.