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"One day, the Navy swears, it’ll have a massive laser aboard its ships to fry missiles out of the sky. That day is still years off. But a very excited Office of Naval Research excitedly reports that it’s nine months ahead of schedule, thanks to what it calls a “remarkable breakthrough.”
The Navy’s Free Electron Laser program uses massively charged electron streams generated by an injector to focus light across multiple wavelengths, making it more powerful than most lasers. Turning it into a death ray requires at least 100 kilowatts worth of power. So far, the prototype Free Electron Laser that the Navy has can only generate 14.
But now the Navy thinks it’s broken a power threshold. Tests in December of a new injector yielded the electrons necessary to get the Free Electron Laser up to “megawatt class” beams, the Office of Naval Research said in a statement issued today, nine months ahead of schedule. One of the project’s lead researchers, Dinh Nguyen, said in the statement that he hoped to “set a world record for the average current of electrons.”
Read more here.
The Navy’s Free Electron Laser program uses massively charged electron streams generated by an injector to focus light across multiple wavelengths, making it more powerful than most lasers. Turning it into a death ray requires at least 100 kilowatts worth of power. So far, the prototype Free Electron Laser that the Navy has can only generate 14.
But now the Navy thinks it’s broken a power threshold. Tests in December of a new injector yielded the electrons necessary to get the Free Electron Laser up to “megawatt class” beams, the Office of Naval Research said in a statement issued today, nine months ahead of schedule. One of the project’s lead researchers, Dinh Nguyen, said in the statement that he hoped to “set a world record for the average current of electrons.”
Read more here.