[LibWhacker]

Oh, man... if we could lay our hands on lasers that are a thousand times more powerful than anything in existence today AND reflect backatchya any laser attack on our forces, that would be a tremendous advancement in laser weaponry.

'Course I DID NOT understand this article well enough to make such a speculative leap. But what do you think? Could this revolutionize the capabilities of our armed forces overnight, or is this something that will only make it out of the lab years or decades from now? Like fusion?

[sauropod]

bkmk

[Nifster]

Not in the real world

While this achievement is a big deal they are orders of magnitude away from reaching the desired goal

[SpaceBar]

I guess you had to be there.

[SpaceBar]

Sounds like a quantum hologram.

[BenLurkin]

"In addition to this 'temporal compression', the incident laser beam induces a spatially inhomogeneous radiation pressure on the surface of the plasma mirror... This observation could thus open up new possibilities for the exploration of SF-QED processes in experiments using laser technology."

[JustaTech]

This technique doesn’t create power, it focuses it. They are working with terawatt and looking at petawatt pulses, but those pulses are incredibly short and the pulse repetition frequency is probably not high. Therefore the average power is probably low.

To get battlefield effects you need high average power as opposed to high instantaneous power. The lasers which can be practically powered on the battlefield are in the kilowatt range, possibly ranging up to low megawatt range.