Back in the control room, I take a seat and begin charging the capacitor banks. At this point there’s no turning back except for an emergency shutdown, which would mean losing the shot and waiting for everything to cool.
“Charging.”
The room falls silent. Everyone fixes their gaze on the monitors. No one speaks.
I usually exchange a look with the researcher whose experiment the shot is for — today it’s Joe, a visiting scientist from Los Alamos National Lab, who designed the target we’re about to vaporize. He’s holding his coffee like it’s precious. I return my attention to the console.
“Charge complete. Firing system: shot in three, two, one. Fire.”
I push the button. A heavy thud moves through the building as the accumulated energy is released into the beam. The monitors freeze, capturing the moment of the shot: beam profiles, spectra, diagnostics—these readings give a complete picture of how the laser performed and whether the shot was clean. Down in the vacuum chamber, a spot smaller than a human hair has reached temperatures measured in the millions of degrees.
I lean back in my chair and start logging laser parameters as everyone exhales. A radiation safety officer goes down first to check readings around the target chamber before anyone else can enter. The experimental team follows to collect the data.
Sometimes everything works flawlessly. Other times a shutter fails to open and the shot is lost.
For example, one afternoon in 2023 we’d spent three hours prepping for a high-priority shot. Target aligned. Capacitors charged. I pressed the button and heard nothing. A shutter had failed somewhere in the chain. The monitors stayed frozen, showing black. Nobody said a word. I wrote SHOT FAILED in the logbook and began the hourlong cooldown sequence. That’s the part they don’t show in movies: sitting in silence, waiting to try again. We got the shot four hours later.
This anticipation is part of the job: hours of patience for about ten seconds you never quite get used to. All of it happens beneath a campus where thousands of people walk above, unaware that for a fraction of a second a tiny point of matter hotter than the surface of the Sun existed below their feet.
Ahmed Helal, research scientist, The University of Texas at Austin. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
