The above Image was taken by Randy Montoya at Sandia National Labs. It is an image of the largest pulse power facility in the world “The Z Machine”. After the U.S. Singed treaties to not do live tests of nuclear weapons, the DOE as been creating creative solutions for verifying computational models and testing components without detonating weapons. The Z machine generates X-ray power of 290 trillion watts per billionth of a second and the center Vacuum chamber reaches 3.6 million degrees F. What you are seeing above is 2.3 million liters of deionized water used as an insulator. The deionized property of the water allows for enough power to run 100 homes for two hours to be released in 100ns. The beautiful lighting like propagation across the surface of the water is actually due to the massive amounts of electricity interacting with impurities in the water. Ideally there would not be this beautiful visualization of the immense power of this facility. The Z machine is also involved in research for the creation of fusion power plants.
Mark Noel
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2nd Place. Crazy to think how much power the machine is generating. Visually stunning.
2nd Place. I find this picture both beautiful and interesting. The physics behind this piece makes it more impressive.
Third place. The amount of raw power this image shows is amazing to think about. Very neat how something so powerful can also be so pretty.
Second Place, I find this piece of art visually stunning. Looks like an electrified spider web.
Third choice. This image is surreal, and so far beyond my understanding. After looking at it for a few minutes, I’m still not entirely sure what I’m looking at. The description of what is going on doesn’t help either, as I can’t possibly understand the kind of energy it would take to make water look like that. Plus I didn’t even know such a thing existed. Wow.
2nd Place. The amount of power in this is incredible. There’s something behind controlled chaos that is truly amazing.