Concentrating laser pulses in space and time - art. no. 63110T

Projecting high peak power laser pulses to a specific location in space and time can significantly improve laser weapons, secure optical communications, and remote spectroscopy. Current laser systems send a pulsed beam from laser to target causing collateral damage to objects in the path for a laser weapon system, opportunities for compromising security in communications, and averaging of measurements along the path for spectroscopy. We analyze and simulate a system that beamforms M mode-locked lasers, each having N modes, to achieve a peak power at a target in space and time that is NM times greater than that for M non-mode-locked non-beamformed lasers. In low atmospheric turbulence, a peak power of 10kW can be projected to a point in space and time by a 10 x 10 array of 2W laser diodes, each having 50 modes. Effects of atmospheric turbulence are discussed and were investigated in our previous papers.