Raw Power

[Nic Name]

Electrical discharges illuminate the surface of the Sandia Z Machine, the world's most powerful X-ray source, during a shot in 1998.

By early 1998, the Sandia National Laboratories accelerator had achieved temperatures of 1.8 million degrees, close to the 2 to 3 million degrees required for nuclear fusion.

By 1998, breakthroughs enabled the machine to increase its power output roughly seven times.

The most recent advance resulted in an output X-ray power of about 290 trillion watts -- for billionths of a second, about 80 times the entire world's output of electricity.

The figure represents almost a 40 percent increase over the 210 trillion watts -- itself a world record -- reported last summer.

Strangely, the power used in each trial is only enough to provide electricity to about 100 houses for two minutes. Electricity is provided by ordinary wall current from a local utility company.

Yet particles imploded in the accelerator's tiny targets -- about the size of a spool of thread -- reach velocities that would fly a plane from Los Angeles to New York in a second.

Charge ahead to 2002:

Currently, (no pun intended) the Z-Beamlet Laser (ZBL), one of the largest pulsed lasers in the world, is Sandia's most recent enhancement of the Z Machine, the most powerful electrical device on earth. ZBL provides scientists from around the world with a state-of-the-art diagnostic tool to take X-ray pictures of matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density. The $12.875 million project to construct ZBL was a multiyear collaborative effort between Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

CAUTION: If you've got bandwidth to burn, click on the pic to download the 2.8mb jpeg at 1172 X 773 pixels (Photo by Randy Montoya)

[Pie]

Yowzah -- I remember when 1.21 gigawatts seemed like a lot.

- Pie