I'm looking to create as strong a magnetic field as possible with a laser beam. The laser system should also be as lightweight as possible, and as compact as possible. I'm looking for a continuous wave or pulsed fast enough to be thought of as continuous.

Is it possible to run polarization filters on any laser light? Should I just look for raw wattage? Also, I want the magnetic field to not only be as poswerful as possible, but as large as possible. Should I go for a small beam or larger beam diameter to accomplish this? Or does it matter?

Perhaps I am misunderstanding something but how does one "create a magnetic field" with a laser?

Laser light is an electromagnetic wave, so (to my understanding) you polarize the light using a technique such as this:

http://www.dewtronics.com/tutorials/lasers/leot/course06_mod10/mod06-10.html

This is used in laser printers to put ink on the page.

Laser light is already polarized I believe.

Thanks orbie, so does this mean all lasers have magnetic attraction?

In a laser beam (or any kind of light), the amplitude of the magnetic field fluctuation is related to the amplitude of the electric field fluctuation by B=E/c, where c is the speed of light. To get a reasonable magnetic field, you'd need a ton of power, and the field would be an AC field.