Scientists at Japan's Osaka University are claiming to have fired the most powerful laser on the planet.
The laser, measuring two petawatts (two quadrillion watts), was shot by a device known as the Laser for Fast Ignition Experiment (LFEX), a 100-meter-long machine that was upgraded with four amplification devices at the end of 2014, according to Engadget.
The LFEX only used several hundred joules of energy, the amount of energy required to operate a microwave for two seconds. However, the power of the beam it released was so high that it was equivalent to 1,000 times the world's energy consumption, researchers claim.
The reason the power output was so high, relative to the energy used to produce it, is because the energy was delivered over a short period of time, one pico-second, or a trillionth of a second, rather than over a sustained period of time. Now, the team is working on enhancing the laser's performance.
"With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts," Junji Kawanaka, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the university, said, according to RT.
Up until the announcement of Osaka's laser, the record for the highest output laser was held by the University of Texas, Austin for producing a one-petawatt laser (100 times less energy than the one produced by Japan), according to the Daily Mail.
The laser, which has been likened by many to the infamous, planet-destroying Death Star laser in Star Wars, is mainly of scientific interest and lacks any real-world application.
