Meet Tsar Laser, the World’s Most Powerful Laser Installation Owned by Russia

JAKARTA – Russia is currently building UFL-2M aka Tsar Laser . It is estimated that the installation of this device will reach full capacity in the next four to five years.

“We have worked out the technology, physics and physical models, and launched the first phase of the physical foundations of the engineering system. I think that in the next four to five years, this installation will operate at full capacity and produce the expected results,” Dr. Valentin Kostyukov was quoted as saying by Sputnik.

Russia has had a brilliant record as a pioneer and leader in the field of laser technology. All of this is inseparable from the contribution of scientists Valentin Fabrikant, Alexander Prokhorov, Nikolai Basov, and Zhores Alferov who designed, developed, and built the world’s first laser technology in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The Tsar Laser itself is very useful for creating clean energy. In addition, it also has a variety of other potential uses, including modeling the processes that occur during a nuclear explosion, making it very useful for research into new thermonuclear weapons.

This laser installation can also help in groundbreaking research in the field of high energy density physics. That is, studying the properties of matter in extreme conditions, including high pressures and temperatures, typical of powerful explosions, which can be useful, for example, in studying the processes that occur in the sun and other stars. Simply put, the Tsar Laser is a miniature sun created in a laboratory environment.

Developed in the late 1980s following the construction of the groundbreaking 12-channel Iskra-5 laser, the UFL-2M is designed for large-scale experiments on controlled thermonuclear fusion using inertial plasma containment. Its first module began operating in 2020, and useful research began in 2021 and 2022.

Once fully operational, the UFL-2M will have a power output of 4.6 megajoules (MJ). By comparison, the US National Ignition Facility laser, which set a world record for laser energy output last October, achieved 2.2 MJ, producing a useful yield of 3.4 MJ of fusion energy.

France is the only other country with a similarly powerful laser, with the Mégajoule Laser facility outside Bordeaux having a power generation capacity of up to 2 MJ.

UFL-2M consists of 192 0.53 micron laser beams (with power generated by a solid neodymium glass laser), which are introduced simultaneously into the spherical interaction chamber from all sides.

The 10-meter diameter chamber weighs 120 tons and is lined with 100 mm thick aluminum alloy. The facility’s laser room is 130 meters long, and is built on a special foundation to protect it from seismic influences. The facility covers about 16,000 square meters of clean space. The total cost of the project is about 45 billion rubles (485 million US dollars).

(msf)