The Tiny Star Explosions Powering Moore's Law

The Tiny Star Explosions Powering Moore's Law(spectrum.ieee.org)

131 points by mcharawi 1 year ago | 13 comments

Mistletoe 1 year ago |

IEEE is so cool. They could have went the stuffy way of most organizations like that, but they really try and succeed to make interesting articles. They stayed hip.

chasil 1 year ago |

Recent Japanese research has focused on reducing the number of mirrors by reshaping them, improving efficiency.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41336690

00N8 1 year ago |

Nice article, although I think this must be a typo: "Despite the fact that a supernova has 1045 times as much energy as our tin blasts, the same math describes the evolution of both types of explosions."

Maybe they meant 10^45 times as much energy?

hnuser123456 1 year ago | |

Was probably written in one system, formatted with the 45 as superscript, then copied into a CMS that converted the superscript back to regular script. Lots of popsci type publications end up having this happen.

skmoore 1 year ago | | |

Yeah. It's fixed now.

saulpw 1 year ago | | |

This is yet another reason I'm promoting the ^45 "magnitude notation"[0].

https://saul.pw/mag

hinkley 1 year ago | |

1045 is a pretty weird multiple. And probably moves us up quite a ways on the Kardashev Scale.

trhway 1 year ago |

Can we repurpose the ASML machine as fusion drive? Asking for a friend.

Especially when lithography in near future will move from EUV to X-ray, the difference between NIF and ASML would become even smaller (or may be ASML would even use Sandia Z alike).

leptoniscool 1 year ago | |

you may be thinking of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy

Here the machine is using tin, which isn't suitable for fusion (no energy is released beyond iron).

trhway 1 year ago | | |

replace tin droplets with DT pellets :)

rini17 1 year ago | |

Not really, the temperature used for EUV or X-ray generation is still several magnitudes away from fusion.

pfdietz 1 year ago | | |

Also, the whole point of EUV/XUV sources is to rapidly and efficiently convert the plasma energy into photon radiation, which is just the opposite of what you want in a fusion plasma.