By Staff Writer (media@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Jul 30, 2015 06:45 AM EDT

The most powerful laser on Earth has been fired.

Although the device packs a lot of power, it actually does not require a lot of energy to function.

Asahi reported that scientists at Osaka University fired the most powerful laser beam in the world.

The team at the Institute of Laser Engineering in the Japanese university produced a 2-petawatt or 2 quadrillion-watt laser beam via the giant Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments (LFEX).

The LFEX has a length of about 100 meters, including the observation apparatus. There were four set of devices required to amplify the laser beam. These were all finished at the end of 2014.

The complex product also had several other features, presented by Engadget in an image.

The LFEX has a Faraday isolator, deformable mirrors, focal planes, pick-up mirror, spatial filter, amplifier head, end mirror and pockets cell, among others.

The laser immediately concentrated energy equal to 1,000 times the electricity consumption of the whole world to fire.

The energy required to power the laser beam was actually very small, sufficient to operate a microwave for about two seconds. The output however, was massive, after the power was concentrated to 1-pico second, or one-trillionth of a second.

Engadget said that the LFEX actually used only a few hundred Joules during the initial trial. The high powers were not produced with giant currents, but through amplifications of the signal via several glass lamps throughout the 328-foot-long device.

During the experiment, energy was placed to special glass via devices that were actually standard lamps that resemble common fluorescent tubes.

These amplified the power of the laser beam repeatedly. More experiments were conducted by the team and confirmed on July 27, 2015 that they set a new world record.

Details of the record-breaking test have been published in the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. The team continues to aim for a more powerful laser beam, based on the same Asahi report.

"With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output to 10 petawatts," said JunjiKawanaka, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Osaka University.

Popular Science wrote that a previously fired 50,000-watt laser successfully destroyed a drone located one mile away. The laser was 10 billion times less powerful than the one in Japan.

More news and updates regarding the LFEX and a possibly more powerful laser beam are expected in the coming months.

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