US Navy submarines lurking in ocean depths soon may be able to turn on, just like automobile headlights, an extremely bright beam of blue laser light to communicate soundlessly with other submarines in close proximity, with surface vessels or with aerial vehicles. The intense laser light also could be used to locate and image other potentially hostile underwater vehicles or obstacles or to provide ranging information without an acoustic pinging noise that can disclose location. The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory's discovery of these new techniques, which allow visible light to be produced, opens many new possibilities for undersea warfare. The device being developed is a tiny solid-state laser excited by diodes. This new, highly efficient laser is one of the few technologies that can generate laser emission directly in the blue-green passband of seawater, according to laboratory scientists involved in the development program. The solid-state laser, based on the energy from rare earth ions thulium, praseodymium and erbium, would be the only compact laser with emission in this wavelength region, providing efficiency and reliability, the scientists explained.
Solid-state laser opens undersea observations
Festkörperlaser für Unterwasser-Beobachtungen
Signal ; 44 , 7 ; 27-29
1990
3 Seiten
Article (Journal)
English
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