I go back to the control room, sit down and start charging the capacitor banks. At this point, there’s no going back except for an emergency shutdown, and that means losing fire and waiting for things to cool.
“Charging.”
The room is silent. All eyes are on the monitors. Nobody is talking.
I’ll usually share a vision with the researcher who is meant to film the project – today it’s Joe, a visiting scientist from the US. Los Alamos The National Laboratory that prepares the target that we are about to vaporize. He holds the coffee cup as if he owes it to him. I go back to the console.
“Charge complete. Firing system fired three, two, one. Fire.”
I press the button. A loud noise comes from inside the building as all the stored energy pours into the beam. At the moment of the shot, the monitors freeze, capturing everything: beam profiles, spectra, diagnostics—these measurements give a complete picture of how the laser is working and whether the shot is clean or not. Below, in the vacuum chamber, a speck smaller than a human hair reached temperatures measured in millions of degrees.
Leaning back in my chair, I begin recording the laser settings while everyone catches their breath. A radiation safety officer descends first to check readings around the target chamber before anyone can enter. The experimental team follows to collect data.
Sometimes everything works perfectly. Sometimes the shutter doesn’t open and you lose the shot.
For example, one afternoon in 2023, we spent three hours preparing for a high-priority shoot. The target is aligned. Capacitors are charged. I pressed the button and heard nothing. Somewhere in the chain, the shutter had failed. The monitors remained frozen, appearing black. Nobody said anything. I wrote SHOT FAILED in the log and started the hour long cool down sequence. This is the part they don’t show in the movies: they sit in silence, waiting to try again. Four hours later we got the shot.
That expectation is part of the job: hours of 10-second patience you never get used to. It all happens below a city where thousands of people are walking above, unaware that for a split second a tiny substance hotter than the surface of the Sun exists beneath their feet.
Ahmed Halalresearch scientist, University of Texas at Austin. This article is being republished Conversation Under Creative Commons license. read it original article.
