After over five years of research, a team has advanced ultrafast laser technology with potential military and civilian uses. These lasers produce power equivalent to the U.S. electrical grid for brief moments. Applications include defense against heat-seeking missiles, detection of harmful gases, and aircraft safety. Civilian uses could help in greenhouse gas detection and medical therapies. Although experiments planned for early this year aimed to validate key predictions, a stop-work order halted progress, threatening the future of this million-dollar project.
"We were hoping to verify predictions we made based on fundamental physics understanding we had developed, as well as computational tools we used to predict what can happen in the real world."
"These pointed us to the conclusion that we can be successful in very efficiently converting powerful near-infrared laser light from a good commercial laser source to the mid-infrared range vital for defense applications."
Collection
[
|
...
]