Photonic Products laser blog

Germany has become the first foreign customer for the new U.S. LJDAM (Laser Joint Direct Attack Munitions). This is the GPS JDAM system, but with the more accurate laser guidance instead of GPS. It’s economical because the only difference between JDAM and LJDAM is the seeker.

On the down side, laser light can be blocked by rain or sand storms, but laser guidance is more accurate (hitting within a meter or two of the target, compared to ten meters for JDAM) and able to hit moving targets.

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A US military plane equipped with a powerful laser has moved a step closer to becoming a viable weapon.  Engineers have started flowing chemical fuel through the laser to test its sequencing and control.

This will set up the first test firing of the weapon aboard the aircraft while it is on the ground.

The US Air Force’s Airborne Laser (ABL) is designed to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles in the early stages of their flight.

“The Airborne Laser team has done a great job preparing the high-energy laser for these fuel tests, which will lead the way toward achieving ‘first light’ of the laser aboard the aircraft,” said Mike Rinn, vice president of Boeing, which is prime contractor on the project.

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Real-life laser weapons aren’t here, yet. But they’re getting closer. Which is why the Air Force is starting to look for ways to laser-proof its bombs and missiles — with spray-on coatings, no less.

A new Air Force request for proposals asks researchers to come up with ways to find “retrofittable laser protection for weapons.” In tests, U.S. and Israeli ray guns have shown the ability to melt holes in all kinds of munitions. Several American defense contractors are working to translate those results into battlefield tools. And if they’re successful, the Air Force figures, it’s really only a matter of time before some adversary’s mad scientists figure out how to pull off the same trick.

Hence the need for “High Energy Laser (HEL)-shielding technology that can be applied to vulnerable airframe components and internal guidance electronics of [a]ir-delivered bombs and missiles.”

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Electrically powered semiconductor laser diodes are a highly convenient source of laser light, and shorter wavelengths of operation have become available, with the potential to enable larger-capacity optical data storage. Now, Harumasa Yoshida and colleagues describe an electrically powered semiconductor laser diode that operates effectively at a UV wavelength - the shortest so far at 342 nanometres, and 63 nanometres shorter than the laser wavelength used in Blu-ray disks.

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New laser technology that could dramatically improve precision measurement ranging from atomic to outer-space applications has been developed by physicists at The Australian National University.

The twin laser technology will extend the capabilities of high-precision laser pointers in the measurement and alignment of very small nano-components right through to very distant objects, such as satellites.

The findings are published in the latest edition of Science.

Single laser pointers can be found inside many of the most sensitive microscopes, where they are able to probe individual atoms and living organisms, explains researcher leader Professor Hans Bachor.

He says there is always some fundamental uncertainty to what scientists can know.

“For a single laser beam we can’t say with ultimate precision where it is and where it is heading at the same time,” he said.

“Twin laser pointers enable us to say precisely where the single laser beam is or where it is heading, once we have seen the other beam. This sounds simple, but it is actually an important and difficult test of quantum physics.

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Applied scientists at Harvard collaborating with researchers at Hamamatsu Photonics in Hamamatsu City, Japan, have demonstrated, for the first time, highly directional semiconductor lasers with a much smaller beam divergence than conventional ones.

The innovation opens the door to a wide range of applications in photonics and communications. Harvard University has also filed a broad patent on the invention.

Spearheaded by graduate student Nanfang Yu and Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering, all of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and by a team at Hamamatsu Photonics headed by Dr. Hirofumi Kan, General Manager of the Laser Group, the findings were published online in the July 28th issue of Nature Photonics and will appear in the September print issue.

“Our innovation is applicable to edge-emitting as well as surface-emitting semiconductor lasers operating at any wavelength—all the way from visible to telecom ones and beyond,” said Capasso. “It is an important first step towards beam engineering of lasers with unprecedented flexibility, tailored for specific applications. In the future, we envision being able to achieve total control of the spatial emission pattern of semiconductor lasers such as a fully collimated beam, small divergence beams in multiple directions, and beams that can be steered over a wide angle.”

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A study published in the July/August issue of Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery finds that carbon dioxide laser resurfacing is an effective long-term treatment for facial wrinkles.

In carbon dioxide laser resurfacing, a laser blasts water molecules inside and outside of cells, which vaporizes the water and causes heat damage to the surrounding tissue. The skin’s response mechanism to this tissue damage is to produce more of the wrinkle-filling protein called collagen.

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Researchers in Korea believe that their tiny green laser ticks all the boxes for mobile projection applications.

The smallest green laser containing a built-in temperature controlling unit has been built by researchers in Korea. The device measures just 0.7 cubic centimetres, which is nearly the same size as existing red and blue diode lasers, has an electrical-to-optical conversion efficiency of 7.8% and a 25 mW power output. These performance characteristics could see the device being used in mobile projection applications (Applied Physics Express 1 062005).

Many major IT and display companies are keen to put projectors into mobile phones and other hand-held devices. However, such applications require red, blue and green lasers with specific characteristics. Although red and blue lasers are already available as edge-emitting laser diodes, a green laser has been more difficult to make.

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HOW do you study several thousand dinosaur footprints spread across 2 kilometres of a soft-rock outcrop at a slant of 60 degrees? Zap them with a laser.

The footprints, at the Fumanya site in the southern Pyrenees in Spain, record the passage of huge long-necked dinosaurs called titanosaurs across a muddy area about 70 million years ago. The problem is that the footprint layer is soft and crumbling, and climbing the steep surface could damage the tracks.

So Phil Manning of the University of Manchester, UK, and his team scanned the surface with LIDAR - a laser technique that maps features in a similar way to radar.

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Which sounds like a better way to make the roads safer: rescind drivers licenses from people who are very old and have failing vision, or create a fancy system with lasers to allow them to keep driving?

If you answered the latter, you’re in the same camp as General Motors. They’re hard at work on a fancy new windshield that uses lasers, infrared sensors and a camera to make it easier for your decrepit old granddad to see just where the hell he’s going.

The system projects a laser on the windshield to highlight things that you should be noticing.

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