China is building a laser that can produce 100 quadrillion watts – about 50,000 times the planet’s total power consumption — a light so intense that it would equal the amount of power our Earth receives from the Sun.
Station of Extreme Light
At the heart of the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF), due to go online in 2025,is a single cylinder of titanium-doped sapphire about the width of a Frisbee. After kindling light in the crystal and shunting it through a system of lenses and mirrors, the SULF distills it into pulses of mind-boggling power, achieving an unprecedented 5.3 million billion watts, or petawatts (PW), reported Science.