Laser aims to imitate sun’s center, hydrogen bomb

In a building the size of a football stadium, engineers have assembled the framework for a network of 192 laser beams, each traveling 1,000 feet (305 meters) to converge simultaneously on a target the size of a pencil eraser.

The trip will take one-thousandth of a second during which the light’s energy is amplified many billions of times to create a brief laser pulse 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States.