Re:How once-elusive laser weapons suddenly became a reality
by jasonwatkinspdx on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @11:57PM
(#25216955)
I've been following this topic as a curiosity. I'm not totally certain but I think the LM systems don't have adaptive optics. But DARPA had a program where they were making something analogous to a phased array out of fiber lasers, where each individual laser had its own independent lens, and a phase shifter is used on each to align all the beams in real time so they're all mutually coherent. The phase shifter is tuned in real time by reflection back along each beam line from the target, split off with a beam splitter to some sort of sensor.
They stopped talking about it after like 2 years, which maybe means it was a flop or maybe they took it secret. Who knows. If you're curious this is the name to google: https://www.darpa.mil/program/excalibur
Re:How once-elusive laser weapons suddenly became a reality
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on Thursday November 26, 2020 @08:48AM
(#25219969)
Can lasers be steered with phase shifting as radar can?
Re:How once-elusive laser weapons suddenly became a reality
by jasonwatkinspdx on Thursday November 26, 2020 @03:19PM
(#25223231)
Not to the same extent. Each element in a radar phased array has a wide angle of emission, and the overlap is necessary to produce the final aggregate steered beam. Lasers need to have as low dispersion as possible to be useful at range, so they can't do that. The project above used some other means of pointing for broad beam steering. The phase shifters are just such that each individual laser is closer to constructive vs destructive interference at the target surface.
Re:How once-elusive laser weapons suddenly became a reality
by xyzzyz on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @10:43PM
(#25216616)
If your beam is perfectly coherent, then its cross section has the same area regardless of the distance, so you should be getting full power. However, no beam is perfectly coherent, so it’s still O(1/r^2), and the better coherence, the smaller constant you have hidden in the big-O notation.
Re:How once-elusive laser weapons suddenly became a reality
by ssivark on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @11:11PM
(#25216734)
1/r^2 comes from the fact that space is three dimensional. No amount of beam collimating can change that (unless we have some fundamental breakthrough/change in our understanding of physics). Better beam coherence could keep improving on the solid angle, which is the multiplicative coefficient to the (asymptotic) scaling behavior.
And yes the optics must be pretty impressive -- I wonder if adaptive optics (from astronomy) are used at these ranges and target sizes?
And then, a puzzle I've always wished to have the knowledge to solve. Does a laser beam obey the 1/r^2 rule in intensity and area spread over distance? Of course it does, light waves intrinsically have that property I think. But how do you show it when it comes to a coherent beam that is always depicted as a focused pencil out into space forever?