An international team of physicists has demonstrated the potential use of multimode optical fiber to scale up power in fiber lasers by three-to-nine times but without deteriorating the beam quality so that it can focus on distant targets.
“The new approach will allow the industry to continue squeezing out extremely high power from fiber lasers, make them more useful for the defense industry, and for remote sensing applications and gravitational wave detection,” said Dr. Linh Nguyen, a researcher at the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia.
“High-power fiber lasers are vital in manufacturing and defense, and becoming more so with the proliferation of cheap, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) in modern battlefields.”
“A swarm of cheap drones can quickly drain the missile resource, leaving military assets and vehicles with depleted firing power for more combat-critical missions.”
“High-power fiber lasers, with their extremely low-cost-per-shot and speed of light action, are the only feasible defense solution in the long run.”
“This is known as asymmetric advantage: a cheaper approach can defeat a more expensive, high-tech system by playing the large number.”
“In delivering an asymmetric advantage this advanced capability has the potential to provide a strong deterrent effect.”
“Australia has a long history of developing innovative fiber optics technologies,” added Dr. Ori Henderson-Sapir, a researcher at the University of Adelaide and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery.
“Our research launches Australia into a world-leading position to develop the next generation of high-power fiber lasers, not only for defense applications, but to aid new scientific discoveries.”
The team’s work was published in the journal Nature Communications.
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CW. Chen et al. 2023. Mitigating stimulated Brillouin scattering in multimode fibers with focused output via wavefront…
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