The folks over at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory have created a laser to research gamma ray bursts. They claim it has the power of the entire sunlight on the earth focused down to a few mircrons. The insolation of the earth is 164 watts per square meter. The luminous efficacy of sunlight is 93 lumens per watt and surface of the earth is 507000000000000 square meters. Be sure to check my math. Some one should be able to calculate the candlepower from this. Of course in a few years you will able to buy one of these on Alibaba. Perhaps powered by an antimater battery. How we created a mini 'gamma ray burst' in the lab for the first time
Interesting post and link. Thank you.
Interesting, even though I am not sure why would I EVER buy such thing in Alibaba or anywhere else :face_with_monocle:
cool link, thanks for sharing. very interesting application
Sunlight on the earth only hits half. So you don’t take the surface area of the earth as a sphere, you take it as a flat disk.
It’s also not possible to calculate candlepower without knowing the beam divergence or intensity either.
I read the article. The beam was 200 TW! Crazy!
Regarding your math, you used the entire surface of the earth when sunlight only reaches the projected area. Also, I believe your insolation number must be a yearly average over the entire planet surface including nights. Changing these should anyhow only result in a difference of 1-2 orders of magnitude…
And they focused it on a spot 27 µm in diameter, that’s 3.5 x 10^23 W/m2.
Maybe a resistor mod? And bypass the springs for a bit more output? 
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