Talk:Extreme Light Infrastructure

Purpose of the project

Why there is not a single sentence describing the purpose of ELI? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.229.57.104 (talk) 21:37, 3 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Agree, can a new section be created with goals for the project or a purpose? It is unclear at this moment.MilkStraw532 (talk) 19:22, 4 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Totally agree - Bloomberg is carrying a story that this facility will be able to Zap Nuclear Waste:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/world-s-most-powerful-laser-beams-to-zap-nuclear-waste.html

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Historikeren (talk • contribs) 12:42, 5 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is the singularity near?

While scientists seem to have a good idea what the 3 extreme light facilities will do, what will happen in the Ultra High Field Facility is described as that "something new might happen". This raises the concern with me that experiments of this kind could create a miniature black hole. But let's try to calculate this through.

The energy density of the Ultra High Field Facility is said to equal 10^23 W/cm^3 (the website reads cm^2, which doesn't make sense, or does it?) for an unknown interval of time t.

Quoting http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q388.html, in metric units, energy is measured in ergs. One watt is equal to 10^7 ergs per second. So we have 10^30 ergs/cm^3*t.

Quoting http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q388.html again, using E=mc^2: Energy in ergs of one gram = 1 gram x ( 30,000,000,000.0 cm/sec) x (30,000,000,000.0 cm/sec) = about (3*10^9)^2 = about 10^19 ergs. So depending on the time t, we have the energy of 10^11 grams*t concentrated in one cm^3.

Conceivably, a black hole would require more density than a neutron star.

Quoting Wikipedia, Neutron stars have overall densities predicted by the APR EOS of 3.7×10^17 to 5.9×10^17 kg/m^3. The conversion factor to grams/cm^3 is *1000/100/100/100, so the prediction is 3.7-5.9×10^14 grams/cm^3.

So unless the energy of the Ultra High Field Facility could be maintained for 1000 seconds, or be focused for one second onto a cube with a side 10x smaller, the energy would not be enough to cause a singularity. Moreover, the energy pulses would probably last less than fractions of a second.

So, no singularity, I guess. That is, if the focus of the energy is on vacuum.

Feel free to point out mistakes, your lives may depend on it ;-) Highlander (talk) 19:12, 4 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]