The world’s most powerful laser

New York Times : The $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility , which houses the world’s most powerful laser, as well as the largest optical instrument ever built, will be officially opened on Friday.

The project’s director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition (defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle.

In February, NIF test fired the192 lasers--made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers--into its target chamber. Inside the chamber a small fleck of hydrogen fuel, smaller than a match head, was pulverized for the first time.

Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the core of a star, the hydrogen atoms will fuse into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy.

But raising its energies still further to the point of ignition could take a year or more of experimentation and might, officials concede, prove daunting and perhaps impossible.