Star Wars universe does have lasers of all scales and power levels.
Yet literally no one uses them well on a personal scale.
The Jedi (and Sith for that matter) imbue it with a power of magical stone, and then…use it as a saber.
To balance this stupidity, stormtroopers, clones and droids all use slow, non-continuous energy blasters. With actual lasers, they could insta-kill any Jedi, but they cannot, because otherwise the movie wouldn’t exist.
As I understood from the legends material, lightsaber blades are an arch shape. It extends out, bends at the tip, and returns to the handle. That’s why they’re near infinite, They’re 99% efficiency recycling energy and only energy lost is energy imparted is through impact.
Huh.
I do not recall ever reading or hearing about what is now the ‘legends’ version of the canon… that lightsabers form some kind of self recycling loop, in that manner.
…
But anyway, that also makes no sense in our real world physics.
It… still net expends energy to maintain plasma in a contained space.
Said plasma would want to basically explode outward in every direction, and a real world magnetic field would have to be stronger than that (real world) force, and … also… it would be absurdly thermally hot that any wielder of a lightsaber would basically oven cook themselves within seconds of turning it on.
…
As of yet, nuclear fusion in a tokomak style, contained plasma loop… is still a net energy loss, and that is the closest real world equivalent to a ‘self cohering plasma bolt’ that I can think of…
Barring I guess ‘ball lightning’, maybe, which is theorerically proposed to maybe be some kind of naturally occuring instance of something similar, but to my knowledge, no one has ever like, made a ball lightning generator to test those theories.