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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Since its introduction in the 1977 film "Star Wars," the Death Star has remained one of science fiction's most iconic figures. The image of Alderaan's destruction at the hands of the Death Star's superlaser is burned into the memory of millions of fans.

Scientists and laser experts have maintained that this superbeam could never work due to the properties of lasers—theory says that rather than converging and combining their energy, the beams would just pass through one another.

That was true—until now. A team of researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have added a plasma—a charged mixture of ions and free electrons—to the concept and successfully combined several separate lasers into a superbeam [phys.org]. This work was recently published in Nature Physics, and is a next step in LLNL's 50-year history of leadership in laser research and development.

While this superbeam isn't quite as "super" as the one depicted in science fiction, it stands as an important achievement—for the first time, nine of the National Ignition Facility's (NIF) 192 laser beams were combined to produce a directed pulse of light that was nearly four times the energy of any of the individual beams. Leveraging LLNL's expertise in optics research and development, the team used a Livermore-designed plasma optic to combine the beams and produce this first demonstration of its kind.

Death Star DIYers take note.

Original Submission