20 November 2023

Optical scientists have discovered a brand new strategy to considerably enhance the facility of fibre lasers whereas sustaining their beam high quality, making them a future key defence expertise in opposition to low-cost drones and to be used in different purposes reminiscent of distant sensing.

Researchers from the University of South Australia (UniSA), the University of Adelaide (UoA) and Yale University have demonstrated the potential use of multimode optical fibre to scale up energy in fibre lasers by three-to-nine occasions however with out deteriorating the beam high quality in order that it will possibly concentrate on distant targets.

The breakthrough is revealed in Nature Communications.

Co-first writer Dr Linh Nguyen, a researcher at UniSA’s Future Industries Institute, says the brand new strategy will enable the trade to proceed squeezing out extraordinarily excessive energy from fibre lasers, make them extra helpful for the defence trade, and for distant sensing purposes and gravitational wave detection.

“High-power fibre lasers are vital in manufacturing and defence, and becoming more so with the proliferation of cheap, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) in modern battlefields,” Dr Nguyen says.

“A swarm of low-cost drones can shortly drain the missile useful resource, leaving navy belongings and automobiles with depleted firing energy for extra combat-critical missions. High-power fibre lasers, with their extraordinarily low-cost-per-shot and pace of sunshine motion, are the one possible defence answer in the long term.

“This is known as asymmetric advantage: a cheaper approach can defeat a more expensive, high-tech system by playing the large number.”

In delivering an uneven benefit this superior functionality has the potential to offer a powerful deterrent impact, aligning nicely with the aims of the Defence Strategic Review and AUKUS Pillar 2 aims.

Dr Ori Henderson-Sapir, venture investigator on the UoA’s Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing, says that Australia has a protracted historical past of creating progressive fibre optics applied sciences.

“Our research launches Australia into a world-leading position to develop the next generation of high-power fibre lasers, not only for defence applications, but to aid new scientific discoveries.”

The researchers have demonstrated the expertise in fibre lasers and can report their findings at Photonics West, the premium worldwide convention on photonics expertise, in early 2024.

Notes for editors

“Mitigating stimulated Brillouin scattering in multimode fibers with focused output via wavefront shaping” is revealed in Nature Communications.

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Media contact UniSA: Candy Gibson M:  0434 605 142 E: candy.gibson@unisa.edu.au

Media contact UoA: Crispin Savage M: 0481 912 465 E: crispin.savage@adelaide.edu.au