Recreate the Big Bang using LabVIEW?

[Dave Brown]

NIWeek 2009, Alliance Day: I just attended a session and heard a guy talk proudly about his big laser – a really big laser – like, petawatt big. But he has bragging rights, because in fact, Dr. Erhard Gaul is the head scientist in charge of the Petawatt Project at the University of Texas at Austin, which has developed the world’s most powerful, fully functional civilian laser, and it’s controlled by LabVIEW and PXI instrumentation.

Just to clarify, this laser generates one quadrillion watts (a petawatt), which is about 2,000 times more powerful than the total generation capacity of all U.S. power plants combined! But what’s just as impressive about this laser is its firing speed – 130 femtoseconds (one-tenth of one-trillionth of a second). Yeah, that’s fast. So you’ve got this laser that fires one quadrillion watts of energy within an incredibly short burst of about 130 femtoseconds.

And what, exactly, might one do with all this capability? Ah, just re-create the Big Bang, that’s all. But seriously, Dr. Gaul and his team literally can safely create, in miniature, the same conditions generated by supernovae, or exploding stars, and this can help us learn more about the origins of our universe. They also can research particle fusion as an alternative source for energy. And they’re controlling all this entirely with LabVIEW and an array of PXI instruments. That’s pretty cool.

I must say that Dr. Gaul’s presentation may not have received as much attention as it deserves. There were a lot of people in the session, but I honestly think that every NIWeek attendee should have had the opportunity to see the amazing things that Dr. Gaul’s team has achieved, especially under a very tight budget. It requires some explanation to appreciate such a sophisticated application, and it’s really wild when you realize how easy LabVIEW made it.

So if you happen to be talking to some German-accented scientist at NIWeek and he asks if you want to see his big laser, you just might want to take him up on his offer.

You can learn more about Dr. Gaul’s petawatt project by reading his case study, Controlling the World's Most Powerful Laser with LabVIEW and PXI.