Back in the control room, I sit down and start charging the capacitor banks. At this point, there is no going back except an emergency shutdown, and that means missing the mark and waiting for everything to cool down.
“Charging”.
The room falls silent. Everyone’s eyes are on the monitors. Nobody speaks.
I usually share a look with the researcher whose project the injection is for; today is Joe, a visiting scientist from Los Alamos National Lab, which designed the target we are about to vaporize. He’s clutching his coffee cup like he owes him money. I go back to the console.
“Charge complete. Trigger system fired in three, two, one. Fire.”
I press the button. A loud thud runs through the building as all the stored energy is poured into the beam. The monitors freeze, capturing everything at the time of the shot: beam profiles, spectra, diagnostics – these metrics provide a complete picture of how exactly the laser performed and whether the shot was clean. Below in the vacuum chamber, a dot smaller than a human hair has just reached temperatures measured in millions of degrees.
I sit back in my chair and begin recording the laser parameters while everyone exhales. A radiation safety officer goes down first to check the readings around the target chamber before anyone else can enter. The experimental team follows him to collect data.
Sometimes everything works perfectly. Sometimes a blind doesn’t open and you miss the shot.
For example, one afternoon in 2023, we spent three hours preparing for a high-priority shot. Target aligned. Charged capacitors. I pressed the button and heard nothing. A blind had failed somewhere along the chain. The monitors remained frozen, showing black. Nobody said anything. I wrote FIRING MISSED in the logbook and began the hour-long recovery sequence. That’s the part they don’t show in the movies: sitting quietly, waiting to try again. We received the injection four hours later.
This anticipation is part of the job: hours of patience for 10 seconds that you never get used to. It all happens beneath a campus where thousands of people walk above, unaware that, for a fraction of a second, a small point of matter hotter than the surface of the Sun simply existed beneath their feet.
Ahmed Helalresearch scientist, The University of Texas at Austin. This article is republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
