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By Kris Osborn – Warrior Maven
(Washington, D.C.) Lasers can already incinerate drones, destroy enemy aircraft and possibly even melt incoming anti-ship missiles, but the Army Research Office is fast progressing with new research enabling lasers to transmit data at the speed of light.
While early on, it is potentially a huge breakthrough, as promising new experiments are showing that laser communications can instantly network robots, drones, sensors, weapons and platforms. The work, now being done by the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University, is based upon the science of Photonics, which an Army Research Office essay says “has the potential to transform all manners of electronic devices by storing and transmitting information in the form of light, rather than electricity.”
There are still many challenges to resolve, the ARO paper explains, yet the breakthrough introduces great promise, as lasers could transmit sensitive data across multiple nodes at the speed of light, exponentially faster and potentially more secure than RF communications.
“In order to preserve the information manipulated by a photonic device, its lasers must be exceptionally stable and coherent. So-called single-mode lasers eliminate noisy variations within their beams and improve their coherence, but as a result, are dimmer and less powerful than lasers that contain multiple simultaneous modes,” the ARO paper says.
Researchers have been working on two-dimensional arrays of microlasers that achieve what scientists called greater “power density,” yet the beams still need to be stabilized.
