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On November 14, 1980, the first successful test of the bomb-powered x-ray laser was conducted. The use of a bomb was initially supported over that of the reactor driven laser because it delivered a more intense beam. Livermore's research was almost entirely devoted to missile defense using x-ray lasers. The idea was to mount a system of nuclear ...
The enhancement of the brightness compared to the unfocused output from the bomb is /, where is the efficiency of conversion from bomb X-rays to laser X-rays, and is the dispersion angle. [ 117 ] If a typical ICBM is 1 metre (3 ft 3 in) in diameter, at a distance of 1,000 kilometers (620 mi) represents a solid angle of 10 −12 steradian (sr).
Nuclear fission is used in exotic nuclear pumped lasers (NPL), directly employing the energy of the fast neutrons released in a nuclear reactor. [42] [43] The United States military tested an X-ray laser pumped by a nuclear weapon in the 1980s, but the results of the test were inconclusive and it has not been repeated. [44] [45]
As the common visible-light laser transitions between electronic or vibrational states correspond to energies up to only about 10 eV, different active media are needed for X-ray lasers. Between 1978 and 1988 in Project Excalibur the U.S. military attempted to develop a nuclear explosion-pumped X-ray laser for ballistic missile defense as part ...
The nuclear shaped charge concept was also studied extensively in the 1980s as part of Project Prometheus, along with bomb-pumped lasers. Using a combination of explosive wave-shaping and "gun-barrel" design, up to 5% of a small nuclear bomb could reportedly be converted into kinetic energy driving a beam of particles with a beam angle of 0.001 ...
A related concept from the SDI project was the nuclear-pumped X-ray laser, an orbiting atomic bomb surrounded by laser media in the form of glass rods. When the bomb detonated, the rods would be exposed to highly-energetic gamma-ray photons, causing spontaneous and stimulated emission of X-ray photons within the rod atoms. This process would ...
A Cold War-era bunker is for sale near Hilliard, complete with gamma-ray detector. Hilliard property comes with Cold War-era bomb shelter, gamma-ray detector Skip to main content
In the 1970s Edward Teller, in the United States, popularized the concept of using a nuclear detonation to power an explosively pumped soft X-ray laser as a component of a ballistic missile defense shield known as Project Excalibur. This created dozens of highly focused X-ray beams that would cause the missile to break up due to laser ablation.