Air Force Seeks Laser Weapons for Next Generation Fighters

Dave Majumdar
USNI.org
November 20, 2013

This is a Lockheed Martin concept for a sixth-generation concept aircraft to replace the F-22 Raptor. The Air Force released a request to arm its next generation fighters with offensive lasers. Lockheed Martin Illustration

The U.S. Air Force has released a new request for a high-powered laser weapon that could be mounted on a next-generation air dominance fighter in the post-2030 era.

“The emphasis of this effort is to identify potential laser systems that could be integrated into a platform that will provide air dominance in the 2030+ highly contested Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) environments,” the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) said in a Request for Information document posted on FEDBIZOPPS last week.

The AFRL is particularly interested in lasers that would be at technology readiness level four (TRL4) by October 2014. That means the basic components are already integrated enough to work together in a lab. But the USAF wants the laser to be at TRL5 or better by 2022, which means the system’s components could be integrated with “reasonably realistic supporting elements” to be tested in a simulated environment.

“Laser and beam control systems are being investigated independent of platform in the flight regime from altitudes Sea Level to [65,000ft] and speeds from Mach 0.6 to 2.5,” the AFRL posting states.

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This article was posted: Wednesday, November 20, 2013 at 12:11 pm

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Infowars

Air Force Seeks Laser Weapons for Next Generation Fighters

Laser Time Cloak Hides The Fact That An Event Ever Happened

This is the first almost-practical application of temporal cloaking … but it might work too well.

By Shaunacy Ferro Posted 06.06.2013 at 1:27 pm

Temporal Cloaking In the middle of the image, the light intensity goes to zero, creating a cloaking effect. Lukens et al.

Electrical engineers at Purdue University have found a way to make your data disappear completely–into holes in time. The technique, described in a paper published online in Nature yesterday, uses pulses of light to create “time holes” that allow communication across optic fibers to disappear completely.

The idea of a data cloak, a way to hide the transfer of data in “time pockets,” has existed for a few years, but until now the effect didn’t last long and wasn’t consistent enough to be of any practical use. This is the first temporal cloak that can work quickly enough to hide data streams in telecommunications systems. It can work to hide up to 46 percent of the window of time it takes to transfer data (one of the first temporal cloaking techniques worked less than one percent of the time, according to a Purdue release).

This cloak works using a wave phenomenon called the Talbot effect. Manipulating the timing of light pulses so that the crest of one light wave interacts with the trough of another creates a zero light intensity–where the two signals cancel each other out–in which data can be hidden.

Hidden Data: The cloak flattens the wave, making it invisible to an observer.  Lukens et al.

Right now, author Joseph Lukens, a Purdue graduate student, says the cloaking effect is almost too efficient. “We erased the data-adding event entirely from history, so there’s no way that data could be sent as a useful message to anyone, even a genuine recipient,” he told Nature. Future tweaking might solve this problem to allow super-secret messages to pass through undetected and still make it to the intended recipient. But maybe they can use the current version to destroy embarrassing emails mid-send?

[Nature]

Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

Laser Time Cloak Hides The Fact That An Event Ever Happened

Laser Time Cloak Hides The Fact That An Event Ever Happened

This is the first almost-practical application of temporal cloaking … but it might work too well.

By Shaunacy Ferro Posted 06.06.2013 at 1:27 pm

Temporal Cloaking In the middle of the image, the light intensity goes to zero, creating a cloaking effect. Lukens et al.

Electrical engineers at Purdue University have found a way to make your data disappear completely–into holes in time. The technique, described in a paper published online in Nature yesterday, uses pulses of light to create “time holes” that allow communication across optic fibers to disappear completely.

The idea of a data cloak, a way to hide the transfer of data in “time pockets,” has existed for a few years, but until now the effect didn’t last long and wasn’t consistent enough to be of any practical use. This is the first temporal cloak that can work quickly enough to hide data streams in telecommunications systems. It can work to hide up to 46 percent of the window of time it takes to transfer data (one of the first temporal cloaking techniques worked less than one percent of the time, according to a Purdue release).

This cloak works using a wave phenomenon called the Talbot effect. Manipulating the timing of light pulses so that the crest of one light wave interacts with the trough of another creates a zero light intensity–where the two signals cancel each other out–in which data can be hidden.

Hidden Data: The cloak flattens the wave, making it invisible to an observer.  Lukens et al.

Right now, author Joseph Lukens, a Purdue graduate student, says the cloaking effect is almost too efficient. “We erased the data-adding event entirely from history, so there’s no way that data could be sent as a useful message to anyone, even a genuine recipient,” he told Nature. Future tweaking might solve this problem to allow super-secret messages to pass through undetected and still make it to the intended recipient. But maybe they can use the current version to destroy embarrassing emails mid-send?

[Nature]

Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

Laser Time Cloak Hides The Fact That An Event Ever Happened