cut oil emissions by 90%?

yes you heard right! This molecular membrane is nuts.

May 27, 2025

Happy Tuesday, folks!

Welcome to This Week in Engineering

uh oh!!

Some of you said 1, some of you said 2, but noone got it right 😞

For the last game, the 3rd option, “The first-ever functioning prototype of a flying car was built in the 1980s, but it was kept secret by the US government until 2015,” was a lie.

While there have been many attempts at creating flying cars, there was no fully functioning prototype kept secret by the government (that we know of… :D). The closest we have now are prototypes that are still being tested and developed by various companies.

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The University of Michigan just fired up Zeus, a laser so powerful it makes everything else look like a flashlight. At 2 petawatts (that's 2 quadrillion watts), it's roughly doubled the peak power of any other laser in the US.

To put that in perspective, Zeus produces more than 100 times the global electricity output. But here's the buzzkill - it only lasts for 25 quintillionths of a second. That's shorter than the time it takes light to travel from your screen to your eyes.

The laser facility fits in a space about the size of a school gymnasium. The process starts with an infrared pulse that gets stretched out in time so it doesn't literally tear the air apart. At its biggest, the pulse is 12 inches across and a few feet long. After four rounds of amplification, it gets compressed into a disk just 8 microns thick - 10 times thinner than printer paper.

Getting to 2 petawatts hasn't been easy. The biggest challenge was finding a titanium-sapphire crystal almost 7 inches in diameter - there are only a few in the world. The current crystal took four and a half years to manufacture, and they're waiting on an even bigger one that will push Zeus to its full 3 petawatt capacity.

The team also had to solve some serious technical problems. When they jumped from 300 terawatts to 1 petawatt, the laser was literally darkening the optical components by ripping apart molecules in the vacuum chamber and depositing carbon on the gratings.

Franklin Dollar from UC Irvine is running the first 2-petawatt experiment, trying to produce electron beams with energies equivalent to particle accelerators that are hundreds of meters long.

They're using a technique called Wakefield acceleration, where electrons essentially ride the wake of the laser pulse.

The facility is supported by the National Science Foundation and operates as a user facility, meaning research teams from around the world can submit proposals for experiments. Since opening in October 2023, it's already welcomed 58 experimenters from 22 institutions.

With this level of power now achievable, what breakthrough applications do you think we'll see first? advanced manufacturing? fusion energy research? revolutionary medical treatments?

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