The world’s largest private laser just fired up in race to make fusion power real
Prototype is an early step toward cheaper, laser-driven fusion energy
By Rob Thubron
What just happened? The world’s largest privately owned laser has switched on in Denver, though it’s not part of a Bond villain’s plan to carve their name into the moon, sadly. Fusion startup Xcimer Energy has begun operations at Phoenix, a prototype system designed to test whether laser-driven fusion could one day produce commercial electricity.
Housed inside Xcimer‘s 74,000-square-foot laser facility, Phoenix uses a krypton fluoride excimer laser, a gas-laser design related to technology used in semiconductor manufacturing, albeit at a much larger scale.
The system’s light source operates at pulse energies of more than 1 kilojoule, while its core optical system includes a 38-meter-long gas optic used for stimulated Brillouin scattering pulse compression.
Read the full TechSpot story here.