Posted on 09/06/2019 8:03:26 AM PDT by Red Badger
Converting low-energy beams into high-energy emissions is crucial to making laser weapons practical. But it's currently unmanageable.
CBGO crystals promise to make that conversion with unparalleled efficiency. But Chinese scientists face the same struggle their American counterparts do in controlling thermal management.
There's a global race for better laser crystal technology, a race in which China has invested heavily.
===========================================================================================
Laser could become more efficient in the future, thanks to a discovery from Chinese scientists. Through crystals of caesium bismuth germanate (CBGO), an inorganic chemical compound, the scientists believe that they could convert low-energy beams into high-energy emissions with "unparalleled efficiency," according to Professor Mao Jianggao, team leader at the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, in a statement given to the South China Morning Post.
Compared to modern crystals, the CBGO was 13 times more efficient at converting infrared lasers into highly energized green beams.
“This is a record performance,” Mao said in his statement. “This is why we think the crystal may have potential.”
But that's all it is at this point: potential. Despite their promising showing in tests, CBGO crystals have a drawback in the tremendous amount of electricity required to make them run properly.
The problem that Mao and others are attempting to solve has stumped scientists since the 1960s. Laser weapons aren't commonly used by the military because they're impractical—not because they're unfeasible. The energy required to run a laser weapon can often lead to issues with thermal management, which can cause beam quality degrading. It's a predicament the U.S Navy has run into with its only laser system, LaWS.
CBGOs are non-linear crystals, a family of crystals regularly used for conversion purposes. They're the perfect setting for a technique called frequency doubling, where high-energy lasers force together a pair of low-energy photons. Getting a higher frequency means the laser can carry more energy, increasing its effectiveness.
These high-energy beams are increasingly seen as the future of laser warfare. The Chinese government is in the midst of building of a satellite currently known as Project Guanlan, which means “watching the big waves.” An anti-submarine satellite, Guanlan will significantly increase China's oceanic surveillance abilities with the ability to fire a high-energy pulse on submarines as far down as 1,640 feet.
Some are skeptical that Guanlan is more than wishful thinking. “Five hundred meters is ‘mission impossible’,” said a lidar scientist with the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in an interview with the South China Morning Post last year.
“They [project researchers] won’t be able to break through the darkness guarded by Mother Nature–unless of course they are Tom Cruise, armed with some secret weapons,” the researcher said.
Mao's team is hoping it might have taken the first step toward cracking mission impossible. Laser weapons, which would never need to be reloaded, have been a dream of scientists and science-fiction authors for decades. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union considered arming its cosmonauts with laser pistols. Meanwhile, NASA, acting more in the name of monitoring global warming, has used high-powered lasers to measure levels in polar ice.
Source: South China Morning Post
pong
When I can get them at Harbor Freight, then I will believe.
More accurate headline:
China’s new crystals stolen from American research could finally make laser weapons a thing
Or rather: There's a global race for better laser crystal technology, a race in which China has invested heavily and half the USA is paralyzed by confusion.
Half of the American population and the Democrat Party are distracted by such concerns as global warming, gender dysphoria, affirmative action, and which bathroom to use when real and serious threats, such as an increasingly powerful and imperious China, loom on the horizon.
Instead of heeding the brilliant leadership of their President, these lost souls are wandering about aimlessly, following every paranoid mirage that their equally lost leaders concoct.
The fate of America--and the fate of the world--depend upon who prevails in this Manichaean struggle: the sane or the mad.
The 2020 Presidential Election will determine whether the USA soars into ascendency and greatness or descends into madness and destruction. The choice should be easy, but half the US population, including the Democrat Party, much of the intelligentsia, the news media, and the academic institutions including public grammar schools are intentionally leading America into madness and destruction.
But then they’d only work once or twice at best...............
Evidently, the Death Star uses these crystals.
They got the idea from Diamonds Are Forever.
for later
Don’t cross the streams! Just sayin’...
They never showed us what would happen if they did!................
Mini-Xi, stop humping the giant laser!
Actually, American laser research isn’t the source for this. Our laser research basically stalled out last decade. Federal money was given to climate change research.
Russian laser technology was ahead of ours during the Cold War as well.
Yeah they did.
They crossed the streams and sent Gozer back to her realm.
The idea with this is to have a crystal with nonlinear effect that merges two photons into a new with double frequency (i.e. energy) as described in their article:
A novel cesium bismuth germanate, Cs2Bi2O(Ge2O7) (CBGO), was synthesized by traditional high temperature solid state reaction. Its structure features a 3D network composed of a 1D chains composed of Bi2O8 dimers that are further bridged by Ge2O7 dimers, forming tunnels of seven member rings (MRs) that are filled by the Cs+ cations. CBGO exhibits extraordinary larger Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) response of about 13.7 times that of KDP (KH2PO4) under 1064 nm laser radiation and 1.1 times that of KTP (KTiOPO4) under 2.05 micro-m laser radiation, which is the highest among all of the metal germanates reported so far. CBGO possesses a moderate birefringence (0.073 at 1064 nm) and is phase matchable. Furthermore, CBGO melts congruently and exhibits high thermal stability.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.201909735
Nonlinear optics is a very interesting field and there are a lot of new applications waiting to be commercialized.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.