Ultra-Powerful Laser To Be Built In Romania 41
cripkd writes "The 3rd pillar from the ELI program was given the go ahead Tuesday: 'In Romania, Magurele, the ELI pillar will focus on laser-based nuclear physics. For this purpose, an intense gamma-ray source is foreseen by coupling a high-energy particle accelerator to a high-power laser.' Here are some specs and details about why this is not your regular key-chain laser."
Re:What's the point... (Score:5, Informative)
What's the point if we can't put one of these on a fricken shark? I mean, seriously. Is that too much to ask?
Of course you can put one these on a shark. Unfortunately, you'd have to clone that Megalodon first, they're kind of rare these days.
Re:What is it to "coherently add" laser beams? (Score:5, Informative)
Some beam combining is just lens squeezing a bunch of side by side lasers down into a smaller beam, where the beam shape doesn't matter as much as beam power.
The easiest way to combine two beams right on top of each other is just for them to have orthogonal polarizations, and run them "backwards" through one of the various optics that can split polarizations. You then end up with an unpolarized beam. With a little more care, if you can make sure the phases of the two beams are the same, you can combine two orthogonal linear polarized beams and end up with a linear beam output at 45 degrees to the original polarization, which then allows you to repeat the combining process. You can also use diffraction gratings to combine several beams on to one output beam, without using polarization.
Doing these methods in a coherent fashion requires careful control of the relative phase of each laser, and starts acting more like phased arrays from radio/microwave bands. Things also get messy, as you can easily get into situations where ray optics no longer work and need to work with quasioptics.
Re:Fuck the EU (Score:3, Informative)
Firstly, let us start with another rant: the ESM treaty has nothing to do with the spending of the individual member states, this is handled by another treaty called TSCG (known as the fiscal compact), assuming you mean to protest against the fiscal compact and not actually the ESM treaty.
By the fiscal compact, no one need to ask permission for spending, unless the spend well above what they have previously agreed to, which actually means running a huge deficit, which in turn result in the deficit having to be payed back by your children. From that point of view, there is no democracy in overspending now, since the people who have to pay for do not yet have the right to vote and the government does not spend their money, they spend their future tax payers money. The treaty also does allow for substantial deficits, but only if the budget is balanced over a cycle. I.e. you can go minus now, as long as you go plus in a few years. In addition, the people who have negotiated the treaty are democratically elected.
I do not know how you interpret the EU as the successor of nazi-germany, this just plain ridiculous. I will ignore Godwin on this, as I honestly believe that you do the sufferers of the war a great injustice by saying this. The Union's primary purpose is after all to build a lasting peace in Europe. This said, the Union also have very high standards for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Everything opposite of the third reich.
Should we go on... you may complain against some democratic deficiencies in the EU, but these issues are being solved. The main blockers of democratic reform so far has been the UK and some other member states. In either case, from the next EP elections (2014), the commission president will for example be selected from candidates laid out by the parliamentary groups before the election. In addition Barroso and others (e.g. the future group), have been pushing sweeping changes of the Union to guarantee power to the parliament. The lack of democracy at the EU level is solely the result of it being an intergovernmental organisation to some extent where the states have too much to say about things.