ZEUS – A new two-petawatt laser facility at the University of Michigan

Project execution and facility role

• Commenters praise the project’s disciplined five‑year build, noting the invisible “careful planning and execution” behind such facilities.
• The multi‑year fabrication of key components (e.g., a crystal taking 4.5 years to manufacture) reinforces the scale and difficulty.
• People highlight that ZEUS is an NSF user facility, seeing this as evidence it’s intended as a shared research tool, not just a prestige project.

Power, energy, and “Death Star” misconceptions

• Several comments point out confusion between power (watts) and energy (joules).
• ZEUS’s 2 PW comes from extremely short pulses: ~20–25 femtoseconds, ~50 J per shot, about once per minute—comparable to a few seconds of a phone flashlight in total energy.
• One commenter emphasizes there is no realistic path from this to a multi‑second, petawatt‑class “superweapon”; scaling energy by ~10¹⁶ would be required and would obliterate the facility.
• A playful “mosquito–to–Death Star” logarithmic scale is constructed, then critiqued as misleading because it ignores pulse duration and total energy.

Scientific and practical applications

• Short, intense pulses are noted as ideal for ablation: very sharp material removal with minimal collateral heat damage.
• Past demonstrations of laser cutting tissue with single‑cell‑scale damage are mentioned; commenters speculate about surgical and radiotherapy targeting applications, with some details about fiducial markers and motion compensation.
• Others connect femto/picosecond lasers to paths toward inertial confinement fusion at longer pulse durations and higher energies.

Operation, noise, and pulse physics

• People trade anecdotes about loud high‑power lasers, with clarification that most noise comes from cooling and support equipment.
• Femtosecond lasers can audible “buzz” by ionizing air; speculation about ZEUS’s repetition rate leads to links to its spec sheet.
• A brief physics explainer describes how very short pulses necessarily have broad spectra due to the time–energy uncertainty relation, complicating mirror and lens design.

Comparisons and global context

• Commenters note that ZEUS is “most powerful in the US,” not the world; they cite a 10 PW facility in Romania and a proposed ~100 PW Chinese project.
• NIF is cited as the “most energetic” laser (~2 MJ), distinct from ZEUS’s peak power focus.
• Some mention real and proposed military laser systems, noting that practical destructive lasers exist but with atmospheric and scaling limitations.

Humor and pop‑culture riffs

• The thread is peppered with Real Genius, Star Wars/Death Star, XKCD, Family Guy, and meme references.
• Jokes about popcorn, drilling through Earth, and “Zeus” objecting to anything less than a zettawatt reinforce the gap between pop‑culture laser fantasies and ZEUS’s actual scientific purpose.