Free Republic

A deadly laser weapon which can blow up drones and hypersonic nuclear missiles at the speed of light has been revealed to the public in newly declassified footage. The video shows Britain achieving its first high-power firing of the Dragonfire laser weapon, as it successfully destroyed a drone in the sky using the system's death ray. In these secret trials at the Military of Defence's Hebrides Range, the weapon proved so accurate it could hit a £1 coin half a mile away, with each 'shot' said to cost around £10. Its full range remains classified, but the invisible 50kW beam...

(Jacob Long/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) In December 2022, scientists at the US National Ignition Facility announced a historic milestone: for the first time, their laser-powered fusion reaction had 'broken even', producing more energy than it consumed. But advances as big as this need to be rigorously checked – and that can take some time. Importantly, a series of papers detailing the experimental design, technological advancements, and results of the initial breakthrough reaction have just passed peer review, meaning researchers not involved in the work have vetted the methods and findings in order to check the sums. "This achievement is the...

The US Navy's laser weapon program has hit various snags. Image: Popular Mechanics / Facebook Screengrab While broadly touted as the future of shipboard point and missile defense, laser weapons have been glaringly absent in the US-led coalition strikes against Iranian-supplied drones and missiles used by Houthi forces in Yemen to attack commercial vessels and warships in the Red Sea. This month, Breaking Defense reported that Rear Admiral Fred Pyle, the US Navy’s director of surface warfare requirements, has expressed frustration with the current pace of laser weapon system development. Pyle believes that the US Navy and American defense industry...

JERUSALEM — After two decades of research and experimentation, Israeli defense officials now say they have a working prototype of a high-powered laser gun that can intercept rockets, mortar shells, drones and anti-tank missiles in flight. Officials said that the system performed successfully in a recent series of live fire tests in the southern Israeli desert, destroying a rocket, a mortar shell and a drone, and prompting a standing ovation from officials watching the action onscreen. The government has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the weapon, which Prime Minister Naftali Bennett described this week as a “strategic...

Israel has begun using laser beams, otherwise known as “directed energy” weapons, to shoot down rockets fired from Gaza. The news comes after reports that Lockheed Martin and Israel’s Rafael have been developing Iron Beam, a laser defense system that can be mounted on ships and planes. This week, Israel began using the directed energy weapons, Iron Sting, which is part of the larger Iron Beam laser defense system. Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system is well known, with a 90% rate effectiveness rate. However, each Iron Dome battery can cost $100 million, and each interceptor costs between $40,000 and...

Israel’s defenses took a giant leap forward this week when — for the first time ever — it used a laser beam to shoot down an incoming rocket fired by terrorists in Gaza. This isn’t science fiction, but the product of years of research and experimentation. The US military is doing its own laser-beam or “directed energy” research, and Israel and the United States cooperate. Lockheed Martin and Israel’s Rafael are developing Iron Beam, and ultimately it can mean not only ground-based laser defenses but lasers to mount on ships and planes as well. Israel fielded the weapon for the...

A NASA spacecraft has beamed a near-infrared laser nearly 10 million miles into space breaking new ground for the agency. The laser, which is encoded with test data, was fired from NASA’s Psyche spacecraft and then sent back to Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, the agency said. The test data was transmitted about 40 times farther than the distance between the moon and the earth, which NASA says is about 238,900 miles. The SpaceX Starship, for context, traveled around 93 miles into space last week. The successful laser transmission, which NASA describes as a...

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy launches the Psyche mission. The orbiter mission will explore the origin of planetary cores by studying the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. 16 Psyche is the heaviest known M-type asteroid. The mass of the payload is 2,600 kg. Instantaneous Launch Window: October 13th at 10:19AM EDT (14:19 UTC)

ATLANTA, GA — Sources in the Fulton County Sheriff's Office today confirmed that former president Donald Trump paid the extra $12 required to get the cool laser background on his mugshot. "You can pick from lasers, a forest scene where you pose against this tree, or a starfield," said the photographer as Trump carefully mulled over his options. "There's the regular kinda dark blue one, too, for no upcharge, but you know, only the poor kids do that." "I think, you know, I have to go with the lasers, Carla," he said. "Lasers are cool, everyone knows that. I'm a...

* High-energy laser weapons can now operate ‘infinitely’, thanks to a new cooling system that completely eliminates the build-up of waste heat * The technology could significantly change the face of battle by extending engagement times, and increasing range and damage, researchers say ******************************************************* Scientists in China have claimed a major breakthrough in laser weapons technology, potentially changing the face of battle. Photo: US Marine Corps Chinese military scientists have announced a major breakthrough in laser weapon technology, claiming they have developed a new cooling system that allows high-energy lasers to operate “infinitely” without any build-up of waste heat. According...

Semiconductor lasers, unlike bulky gas lasers and fiber lasers, are tiny, energy efficient, and highly controllable. The one thing they can’t do is deliver their competitor’s steel-slicing brightness. In results reported last week in Nature, a group of researchers at Kyoto University, in Japan, led by IEEE Fellow Susumu Noda, has taken a big step in overcoming the limitations of semiconductor laser brightness by changing the structure of photonic-crystal surface-emitting lasers (PCSELs). A photonic crystal is composed of a semiconductor sheet punched through with regular, nanometer-scale air-filled holes. Photonic crystal lasers are attractive candidates for high-brightness lasers, but until now...

Low-level laser therapy and associated photobiomodulation is the most effective of the known treatments for tinnitus, according to a study comparing the main therapies in current use. Often described as ringing or hissing in the ears, it is considered a symptom rather than a disease, but is unpleasant and in some cases incapacitating. Its known causes can range from a buildup of earwax and insufficient peripheral irrigation in the inner ear to brain damage and bruxism. Panhóca and his team tested alternative and complementary treatments for idiopathic (with no apparent cause) and refractory tinnitus on more than 100 men and...

A newly proposed propulsion system could theoretically beam a heavy spacecraft to outside the confines of our Solar System in less than 5 years – a feat that took the historic Voyager 1 probe 35 years to achieve.The concept, known as 'pellet-beam' propulsion, was awarded an early-stage US$175,000 NASA grant for further development earlier this year.To be clear, the concept currently doesn't exist much beyond calculations on paper, so we can't get too excited just yet.Still, it's attracted attention not only because of its potential to get us into interstellar space within a human lifetime – something that traditional, chemical-fueled...

Above the islands of Hawaii on January 28, a green laser was seen piercing the night sky, silently tracing a path towards the horizon like a stutter in the Matrix's code. The scene was caught on camera from a telescope atop Hawaii's tallest peak.

University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics researchers achieved the first observation of de Broglie-Mackinnon wave packets by exploiting a loophole in 1980’s-era laser physics theorem. A research paper by CREOL and Florida Photonics Center of Excellence professor Ayman Abouraddy and research assistant Layton Hall ’22MS has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Nature Physics. Observation of optical de Broglie–Mackinnon wave packets highlights the team’s research using a class of pulsed laser beams they call space-time wave packets. In an interview with Dr. Abouraddy, he provides more insight into his team’s research and what it may hold...

This latest experiment was performed near a telecommunications tower on the Säntis mountain in Switzerland that is frequently struck by lightning - roughly 100 times a year, although the tower itself is protected by a lightning rod. The results from the study found the lightning flowed almost in a straight line near the laser pulses, but the lightning strikes were more randomly distributed when the laser was off. While this study is not the first attempt to direct lightning paths it is the first to show it can be done. The scientists have attributed this to the high power laser...

New research indicates that simple laser treatments to the skin may help to prevent the development of basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, which are collectively known as keratinocyte carcinoma and are the most common types of cancer diagnosed in the United States. The work reveals an easy-to-implement strategy to protect individuals' skin health. Nonablative fractional lasers (NAFL) deliver heat in a fractional manner that leaves it fully intact after treatment (unlike ablative fractional lasers that remove the top layer of skin), and they're currently used to treat scars, sun-damaged skin, age spots, and more; however, their effectiveness for...

A Florida man is under arrest for shining a laser into the cockpit of a police helicopter which temporarily blinded the pilot forcing him to hand the controls to another officer. The Brevard County Sheriff's Office pilot was temporarily blinded by a laser that was flashed into the cockpit multiple times as the officers assisted the Palm Bay Police Department in the search for a man who attacked his roommate, WOFL-TV reported. Police later determined where the laser was coming from and arrested 33-year-old Dean Gordon Beolet, who was not involved in the crime the helicopter had been tracking, and...

Optical High Density Nanolaser Array Driver Researchers have developed a new all-optical method for driving multiple high-density nanolaser arrays using light traveling down a single optical fiber. The optical driver creates programmable patterns of light via interference. Credit: Myung-Ki Kim, Korea University New all-optical pumping chip-based nanolaser technology could aid in meeting the ever-growing need to move more data faster. A new all-optical approach for driving multiple highly dense nanolaser arrays has been developed by researchers in Korea. The method could enable chip-based optical communication links that process and move data much faster than current electronic-based devices. “The development of...

Its implications go well beyond the Earth itself, affecting even the future of space travel. Researchers at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California achieved net energy gain in a thermonuclear fusion experiment. But how great of a breakthrough is this, really? As soon as physicists realized how the Sun made its energy, they dreamed of getting the same process to work on Earth. They have worked on it since the 1950s and finally achieved success. There is still a long way to go. But we can now say with confidence that in the not-too-distant future, fusion power stations will...