Back in the control room, I sit down and start charging the capacitor banks. At this point, there’s no way to go back except emergency shutdown, and that means losing the shot and waiting for everything to cool down.
“Charging.”
The room becomes silent. Everyone’s eyes are on the monitor. Nobody talks.
I’ll usually share a look with the researcher whose project has the shot – today it’s Joe, a visiting scientist at Los Alamos National Lab, who designed the target we’re about to vaporize. He’s holding his coffee cup like he owes him money. I turn back to the console.
“Charge complete. Firing system fired three, two, one. Fire.”
I press the button. A loud rumbling sound echoes through the building as all the stored energy is absorbed into the beam. The monitors freeze, capturing everything at the moment of the shot: beam profile, spectra, diagnostics – these metrics provide a complete picture of how the laser performed and whether the shot was clean. Below, in the vacuum chamber, a spot smaller than a human hair reached temperatures measured in millions of degrees.
I lean back in my chair and begin recording the laser parameters as everyone exhales. A radiation safety officer goes down to check the readings around the target room before anyone else enters. The experimental team follows up to collect the data.
Sometimes it all works out perfectly. Sometimes the shutter fails to open and you lose the shot.
For example, one afternoon in 2023, we spent three hours preparing for a high-priority shot. Goals aligned. Capacitors charged. I pressed the button and heard nothing. A shutter somewhere in the chain had failed. The monitor remained frozen and appeared black. Nobody said anything. I wrote SHOT FAILED in the logbook and began the hour-long cooldown sequence. This is the part they don’t show in the movies: sitting back, waiting to try again. We got the shot after four hours.
This anticipation is part of the work: hours of patience for 10 seconds you never get used to. Everything happens beneath a complex where thousands of people walk above, unaware that for a fraction of a second, a tiny dot of matter hotter than the surface of the Sun existed beneath their feet.
Ahmed Helal, Research Scientist, University of Texas at Austin. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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