Science / Medicine : Record Set on Hiking Intensity of Sunlight

Scientists have set a world record for concentrating the sun’s energy with a homemade, silver device that could help make a practical, solar-powered laser, officials said.

“We consider this a breakthrough because it just hasn’t been achieved before,” said Bimleshwar Gupta of the U.S. Energy Department’s Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colo., which paid for the $150,000 project.

Roland Winston, a University of Chicago physics professor, and Philip Gleckman, a graduate physics student, used a borrowed mirror and their solar concentrator to focus sunlight to 60,000 times its normal intensity on Earth, the university announced. That concentration is about three times the previously achieved range, said Gupta, the institute’s program manager for solar-thermal research.

“This work opens whole new areas for applications of solar energy,” he said. “Perhaps the solar concentrator could be used to power lasers.”

Most conventional lasers run on electricity, he said. There are no commercially available solar-powered lasers because the technology has not been developed to harness the sun’s rays efficiently.