Hey, Veeky Forums
How strong can lasers be made?
Lets say you had neigh infinite electricity, a 99% efficient conversion rate, and invulnerable components.
How intense a laser beam could possibly be made of a given diameter before no more light energy can possibly fit into such a small area? Is it infinite or does weird stuff start happening when photons get concentrated enough?
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Your apparatus will melt before you create a black hole.
>weird stuff start happening when photons get concentrated enough?
I don't exactly remember the documentary (might have been times arrow) but they said light can effect gravity, or maybe photons have gravity, again I forgot sorry. If you had series of powerful enough lasers, arranged in a funnel shape it would create a gravitational distortion where you could fire photons into the funnel and the photons would travel back in time. Anyone know what my swiss cheese memory is trying to think of?
Light has mass so of course it affects gravity
I have seen the documentary you're talking about but cant remember it for the life of me
You'd probably see some weird photon interactions, I've read articles on the interactions in the problem you are talking about OP. And the idea is that they would interact and combine to always be under a critical density or something, then just scatter away out of the area
Energy and mass are equivalent, so if you could make a laser powerful enough, it would collapse into a black hole.
>black hole
>infinite mass
Spotted the underage
>Light has mass
Get thee thine corpulence and
thy Corpuscularianism back
to ye Seventeenth Century,
thou unlearnèd fool.
this is a very interesting question.
At some point, a black hole would form.
Since photons have only a super tiny bit of mass entirely credited to special relativity, it would take an extreme amount of photons for that to happen. But enough energy in a tight enough space will always collapse into black hole.
We do not know enough about quantum mechanics at this point to fully predict the outcome. Photons may have some immeasurably small quantum properties that only come to light in such conditions.
With our current understanding we can tell that weird stuff will happen, we just don't know exactly what. Due to quantum fluctuations and how virtual particles just appear and disappear randomly, having ALL the space filled anywhere could have major effects. Speculations may reach from a weird form of hawking radiation to vacuum decay being kicked off. We just don't know yet.
Ultimately the power is only limited by the materials used in the optics:
For example at very high energy densities the fused silica lenses will be damaged by the laser itself, prevening you from focusing the beam to achieve greater energies
You also suffer greater losses through heating and other inefficiencies
Ever wonder why black holes are black, cuck?
About 5 megawatts
It has energy and momentum and gravitation couples to that. That doesn't mean it has mass. Photons are massless.
Black holes aren't literally black, you moron. We have no idea what color they are. In realistic terms they would probably be some of the brightest things in the universe from all the energy density and energy they put out if most of the radiation wasn't pulled back in and re-absorbed.
Light bends due to massive objects effects on spacetime. Light simply moves along the curved spacetime otherwise unaffected. Light isn't effected by "gravity" in a literal sense since Fg on a photon or any EM radiation would always be 0.
check out the biggest laser ever made in japan called LFEX
And in the event someone could shape magnetism like a focusing lens to direct light, sidestepping the need for a physical lens entirely?
You can't focus light with a magnetic field. Photons do not couple to photons.
If your question is simply "How densely is it possible to pack energy with no realistic physical bounds" then it most likely is bounded by planck numbers like Planck length and Planck temperature.
It's most likely related so some sort of mass energy equivalency and planck length (being the smallest increment of distance possible).
>invulnerable components.
That would solve most of the problems, actually.
A great deal of the problems with making powerful lasers is that they are horrendously inefficient, which means that they produce an ungodly amount of heat.
I think something like 20% efficiency is standard, which means you are dumping 80% of the input energy as heat into the laser components.
If you didn't have to worry about them melting, you could probably scale it up a great deal.
Not sure what kind of bottlenecks you would run into if you aren't counting component melting, cause I think that's the primary one.
Let's see, offhand I know about 6 types of lasers...
Solid, Gas, semiconductor, liquid, electron, and bomb pumped.
Solid lasers (i.e. ruby) use a solid core, a flash tube coil, a mirror and a partial mirror... the first thing to go would be your flash tube coil, followed by your mirrors, and then probably your ruby.
Gas lasers are simmilar to solid lasers, but they use a gas filled tube instead of a solid core, and again the flash tube would be the first thing to go.
Semiconductor lasers are more efficient, but their size limits potential applications (such as DVD player lasers and such)
Liquid lasers don't have a flash coil, but you instead get heating within the accumulation chamber, not to mention the problem with your optics (mirrors, lenses) melting.
Electron lasers use electron beams and synchrotron radiation emission, and the primary point of failure is the magnets, IIRC, and the power density of the electron beam.
Bomb pumped lasers are however, Designed to overheat, spectacularly..... but they are nuclear munitions, so.... they also have limitations on their applicability.
>Light isn't effected by "gravity"
Of course you had to put a scientific word in quotations to make your nonsense fit. Finals are around the corner, undergraduate.
>And in the event someone could shape magnetism like a focusing lens to direct light, sidestepping the need for a physical lens entirely?
Actually, that gives me an idea.
Was just trying to put it into laymens for a thread that clearly lacks understanding of anything beyond Newtonian mechanics.
Gravity effects anything with energy, the rest mass of a photon doesn't matter (also that it has no rest mass), brainlet.
With 99% efficiency I suppose 99% of infinity
>Photons do not couple to photons.
wanna bet?
>tfw velocity modulation in a TWT couples electron beam and EM wave to provide amplification
Your post is nonsensical.
But I suppose you could use the black hole equations with E=MC squared to see how many photons you need to put within a volume for your thing to work.
>Gravity effects anything with energy
Kill yourself immediately undergraduate
Laser Engineer here.
>99% efficient conversion rate
physically impossible. realistically you will never get higher than about 60% due to quantum efficiency. even 60% is crazy high for a laser
I'll assume we're ignoring thermal effects (which are significant and generally the limiting factor).
Next you'll run into a load of problems with actually generating your super dense electric field. You're really limited by the atomic density of the gain medium, and even if you pump it super hard you'll end up with massive amount of re-absorption which destroys the efficiency. But lets ignore that and assume that you use a massive area of crystal and just focus it down.
When the intensity gets high enough that you start to run into non-linear effects.This is where photons basically combine with each other and the harmonics of the light wave start to emerge, due to the way that light interacts with the particles it encounters. Even in a vacuum, at high enough intensities this can happen because, particles and antiparticle pairs are (apparently) constantly emerging out of nothing and then combining to disappear again (see Hawking radiation). I'm not sure what would happen left, if anything. There is no real limit to how dense light can get, but apparently a black hole would form eventually
en.wikipedia.org
>Roleplaying this hard
Then offer a better explanation. I'm not doubting you can't, it's just that you're literally a brainlet until proven otherwise.
Hmmm.
So from what I'm seeing here, one would only need 50-100 thousand Farenheit to pretty much melt through most anything humans could build.
It seems like a terrible, terrible idea to try and make a laser that could bypass the Fusion threshold.
>It seems like a terrible, terrible idea to try and make a laser that could bypass the Fusion threshold.
Maybe. Depends on what you want to use it for I guess. If you want to McMelt™ through your neighbors house with your Mcdonalds™ brand turbo™ Mclaser™ mountd on your Happy™ McMeal™ McScramjet™ M-45™ Jet then maybe it might have applications.
Interesting.
And I apologize, laseranon. The above was intentionally imaginary stuff because it was to get around "we'll never have materials that strong, so it doesn't matter."
Do you think it's possible we'll ever have weapons grade lasers capable of melting tungsten? And.
Would we necessarily need just one great big powerful laser, or if we had multiple decent lasers focus could we multiply the heat and energy on the spot?
Could we have a dozen high power lasers focus on a single point, each of them projecting a pinprick sized beam of 30,000 F, and come up with a heat of 360,000 f?
Lasers as weapons will realistically never happen. There are just too many limiting factors, I can't see us ever getting lasers powerful enough to melt anything without a significant exposure time (which would make a pretty bad weapon) . By the time we got anywhere close we'd have 1000 other more efficient and practical ways to destroy things.
Probably, the Pentagon has put out a ton of money for R&D of a laser to put put on the F/A-XX as a viable close range weapon to shootdown missiles and other airborn targets.
This is the only chart I can find, /k/ has a better one of Lockheed's tested numbers but apparently it's quite feasible (and just about the only weapon you could mount on Scramjets to shootdown other scramjets).
Invulnerable components.
Transience.
I wouldn't listen to /k/ when it comes to lasers.
Laser weaponry is typically used to disable sensors or other key systems. Possibly detonate some explosives if they're positioned badly. But they're incredibly easy to design against.
Zero point energy would 'technically' allow for that form of energy propagation.
>I wouldn't listen to /k/ when it comes to lasers.
Neither would I. I hardly listen to /k/ on weapons larger than "muh AR", but I would trust Lockheed on their numbers... To an extend. Depends if they're trying to sell something or not.
>But they're incredibly easy to design against.
Just heat shielding or reflective paint?
>Just heat shielding or reflective paint?
Among many other incredibly cheap ways.
I don't understand what you're trying to say
Im sad that no one got this. Weak, pathetic children...
Black holes are black. Light is not escaping from them. No light = black. The question of whether or not black holes are black is not just a question of physics, but is also a matter of human perception.
>lasers capable of melting tungsten
We already have these. Aim higher
>en.wikipedia.org
Do we have ANY substances that a laser can't melt anymore?
steel beams
>Lasers are only 20% efficient
Where did it all go so wrong?
Strong enough to blow up Alderaan
Lrn2gravitation, Sociology Major
>without a significant exposure time
>without a significant exposure time
>without a significant exposure time
A powerful enough ruby laser will melt to outright vaporize any metal easily in a single pulse.
Yeah, no shit. Any laser will. There's a massive fucking difference between breaking a few atomic bonds and being an effective weapon.
also
>2016
>still using inferior ruby lasers
Holy shit that sounds cool. I really need to find that documentary