Posted on 12/18/2012 9:39:41 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The stealth technology of America's fifth-generation jet fighters, the F-22 and the F-35, could be obsolete after a new discovery from the University of Rochester in New York.
One main goal of fifth-generation aircrafts is to slip through skies over enemy lines without being targeted. It's not invisible, but elusive, and digitally feisty.
The F-35's lineup of electronic tools, work toward that end, by using a variety of sophisticated and devastating radar defeating moves. Combined with internal weapons storage, special composite skin, and reduced angles of design, the fighter does all it can to work past the weaknesses in today's aircraft detection. Lockheed Martin designers, however, did not plan for this University of Rochester research.
The U of R doesn't look to use a radar wave but instead a quantum image gleaned through a string of photons that boomerang out and back, telling operators everything they've seen. This process can't be jammed, confused, or eluded and rather than get absorbed, reflected, or even restructured to look like something else the photons supposedly report back with only the facts.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
First, given the hints, it's probably an entanglement scheme. Second, the entangled pairs could "report" to each other, but they have only one thing to report: their polarization state. [You can't really entangle the other few quantum numbers of a photon, since they're continuous.] Third, large numbers of entangled photons aren't especially easy to produce and isolate. Sounds like the first feelers of a request for proposal. Maybe the Chinese will fund it.
Well, I’m not an aviation expert of fighter pilot, but I have decades of experience in radar.
This, apparently is an imaging system presents an image to one aspect angle of the scene directly behind it. Take a picture of everything on your left side and present that picture to the right side. Anyone on the right side sees what’s on your left side. I have a close friend that was a PM at DARPA and he opined at some meeting this very concept. He was visited thereafter by a couple of investigators wanting to know where he got the information.
My guess is that this is optical only and it doesn’t work in the RF region (i.e., radar bands). Furthermore, I’d say this is only effective optically for a very narrow aspect angle of views.
See #16.
It's been almost thiry years since I taught Physics 101 to undergrads, but I don't need a refresher. You do.
Photons are the basic quantum mechanical particles of all electromagnetic radiation. They don't have to be "stimulated particularly."
I knew this discussion was going to degenerate into a bunch of "physics" sooner or later! :(
This is pretty fundamental physics-based research that is presumably not funded by any classified DoD programs. Can’t really be going around and retroactively jailing people for simply having ideas.
Anyway, from reading this, what it seems to be is fundamentally a theoretically possibile way to defeat a specific type of jamming, Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) I know just enough about Electronic Warfare to be dangerous, but what DRFM does isn’t block or “fuzz” a radar, it generates multiple fake targets that move just like the real target and that can’t be distinguished from the real target.
Any actual “Old Crows” would probably have a better explanation.
Uses a laser. That makes it a bit difficult to cover larger areas of the sky. And, depending on the laser, it can be blocked by clouds, etc.
https://www.technologyreview.com/sites/default/files/images/Quantum%20imaging.png
100% totally correct, thank you. Anyone who has had a physics 101 class, and was paying attention, ought to know that. Unbelievable!
The Business Insider article is indeed godawful.
The MIT article is, obviously, much better:
And of course the actual scientific paper is better than that:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.2605v1.pdf
The Business Insider idiot fundamentally misunderstood pretty much everything about the research; it basically has NOTHING TO DO with defeatubg “passive” stealth (shaping and materials to reduce a radar return) which is the key to the B-2, F-22, F-35, etc. All it concerns is defeating one particular type of “active” jamming, which is what non-stealthy aircraft, missiles, etc. often employ.
And of course, metamaterials are just over the horizon!
To give any credence to an article that proclaims this is “unjammable” is folly. Anything one man can envision, eventually can be realized by another man. It’s like saying you have discovered everything there is to know about this process and have foreseen anything the enemy can think of. It’s ego-maniacal at the minimum. I do understand, I think their preliminary basis for this, as it was posited some time back that photons could also be used for communication and their quantum state would make it known to everyone if it had been tampered with, or even an attempt was made at tampering. It is theoretically possible, but in reality, someone will eventually crack the code, so to speak.
It sounds like some researchers are creating their own PR to maintain some funding or to acquire a new source of funding.
Thanks.
How do you know it wasn't Chinese students that discovered it? ;-)
Sorry pal. I think you’re thinking of lasers, which indeed emit photons. But that is not the only source of photons, not by a long shot.
The radar “waves” emitted and detected by radar antennas are themselves a type of photon. Every kind of electromagnetic radiation is composed of photons.
Sorry pal. I think you’re thinking of lasers, which indeed emit photons. But that is not the only source of photons, not by a long shot.
The radar “waves” emitted and detected by radar antennas are themselves a type of photon. Every kind of electromagnetic radiation is composed of photons.
There've been some stories about pairing up more than 2 photons ~ so that might be what this is about. It's all too secret for anybody to talk about except in the most hush hush tones, and then only limited to what you would find in a textbook.
Sure, this would beat the devil out of radar ~ and, best news possible, say you can pair 100,000,000 photons, and zip zap them past the aircraft skin and simply evaporate the pilot or other control system ~ somebody will come up with grant money for that!
Yep, the radar was jammed.
BTW, quantum entanglement is absolutely useless for sending information. When you have particles with unknown polarization, looking at one collapses the wavefunction so that the polarization of the other is now quantized. That might be useful... if you knew the polarizations to expect! But the wavefunction collapses in a random fashion (i.e. a percentage of the time it will be polarized one way, and a percentage of the time it will be another, etc.).
Sending a "signal" (whatever your "signal" purports to be) requires that the sender and the sendee both know what to expect (i.e. that the signal is non-random in nature).
For example, let's say you have a machine capable of producing photons that will collapse into entangled states (call them A and B), meaning that if one photon is A, the other must be B. Each time you produce a pair, each photon can be either A or B (and behaves in such a manner that you cannot tell without direct observation... that's the essence and inescapable reality of quantum superposition). When you directly observe the first photon and discover it is an A, then the second becomes a B. However, since you have no way of knowing what either is until you look (thereby causing the collapse and "ending" the entanglement), you have no way of sending a signal with them (because you have no way to modulate whether the particle collapses to an A or B). All you get on either end is a series of random As and Bs.
In other words, quantum entanglement might have a great deal of impact on the the question of Locality, but it has absolutely no use in information transfer.
LIDAR = LIght Detection And Ranging
Battlestar Galactica
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