The world’s largest private laser has just been put into operation

Merger startup Xcimer Energy on Wednesday flipped the switch on its Phoenix laser system, which the company says is the largest privately owned example in the world.

Xcimer’s approach to fusion energy is modeled on the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which demonstrated in December 2022 that a controlled fusion reaction can release more energy than what is needed to ignite it.

NIF trained 192 laser beams on a fuel target smaller than a pencil eraser. The laser energy hit the golden target. When the lasers obliterate the golden target, their energy is converted into X-rays, which focus on the fuel pellet inside, compressing it until the atoms in the fuel fuse and release energy.

The company is betting that more powerful, less complex lasers will help turn NIF’s concept of fusion energy into something more profitable.

Xcimer’s plans for a fusion power plant require the use of two lasers capable of firing microsecond-long pulses. The light from those pulses will be fed through a compression system of sorts, which will deliver the laser energy to the target fuel in nanoseconds. The faster the fuel is compressed, the more likely it is to generate usable fusion reactions.

Phoenix is ​​a step toward eventually creating a power plant. The system uses excimer amplification, which is similar to that used in semiconductor manufacturing but much stronger. At full power, the krypton fluoride laser generates more than 1 kilojoule of energy, and its core is 38 meters long, Xcimer told TechCrunch.

While this may be the most powerful privately owned laser, it is still a fraction of what the company says it would need for a commercial power plant, which could exceed 12 megajoules.

Xcimer hopes to complete a prototype in 2028 before working on a larger system that it hopes will produce at least as much energy as it consumes. Sometime in the mid-2030s, it plans to build its first commercial-scale power plant.