YouTuber Creates “World’s Strongest Handheld Laser”. It’s Capable Of Punching Through Titanium.

“The legal power limit for a laser pointer is 5 milliwatts. Well, I think it would be funny to build one that’s  50,000 times stronger than that,” Drake Anthony, who goes by “styropyro” on YouTube, explained in the video.

“I’ve showcased a lot of ridiculous portable lasers on this channel, but so far, none of them come close to that kind of power. Even my strongest laser, which was world record-breaking when I built it, isn’t even half of this level.”

Anthony called his earlier laser “horribly designed” and attempted to make a new one, utilizing advances in tech over the last five years. To do so, he bought an old radar gun off eBay.

“With an output of 250 watts, this laser eclipses the threshold for the highest laser danger rating by a factor of 500,” Anthony said.

“That means that just 0.2 percent of the laser’s power is already considered an instant blindness hazard, as well as a fire hazard. The luminosity of this laser is especially impressive as well, having more than quadruple the brightness of my 100-watt laser, as this one is a brighter sky blue color.”

Demonstrating the laser, Anthony cut through a copper wire, punched through titanium, and turned alumina powder mixed with chromium oxide into rubies.

So, what exactly is a laser? Essentially, as the name “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation” suggests, it is amplified light.

“A laser is created when electrons in the atoms in optical materials like glass, crystal, or gas absorb the energy from an electrical current or a light. That extra energy ‘excites’ the electrons enough to move from a lower-energy orbit to a higher-energy orbit around the atom’s nucleus,” the National Ignition Facility & Photon Science (NIF) explains.

When the electrons return to their ground state, they emit photons with the same energy as the one that was absorbed.

“Each orbital has a specific energy associated with it. For an electron to be boosted to an orbital with a higher energy, it must overcome the difference in energy between the orbital it is in, and the orbital to which it is going,” NASA explains. “This means that it must absorb a photon that contains precisely that amount of energy, or take exactly that amount of energy from another particle in a collision.”

^{Lasers are awesome.}

While light from usual devices, such as a light bulb, emits a mixture of electromagnetic waves at different wavelengths, that is not the case in lasers.

“In a laser beam, the light waves are ‘coherent,’ meaning the beam of photons is moving in the same direction at the same wavelength. This is accomplished by sending the energized electrons through an optical ‘gain medium’ such as a solid material like glass, or a gas,” the NIF adds.

In further demonstrations, Anthony melted through tungsten, a metal with a melting point of 3,422°C (6,192°F), the highest melting point of any metal, and set a diamond on fire. Needless to say, you should not try any of this at home.