Skip to main content

U.S. Navy’s giant laser beam program achieves ‘milestone’

navy-free-electron-laser-beam-submarine
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Why shoot bullets or missiles, when you can dissolve your enemies with a super laser? It’s a potentially devastating weapon that needs no ammunition, can shoot lasers right out of the sky, and can run for as long as a ship can power it. The U.S. Navy loves the idea so much, it is funding a Free Electron Laser program that  hopes to have a working death ray by 2018. Well, that dream is one step closer to reality. Today, the Office of Naval Research reported that it is nine months ahead of schedule thanks to a “remarkable breakthrough” in power.

One of the biggest hurdles the superlaser program has faced is how to generate the minimum 100 kilowatts of power needed to turn the Free Electron Laser (FEL) from an annoying light to shine in other ship’s eyes to an apocalyptic beam of destruction. Until now, the prototype laser has only been able to generate about 14 kilowatts, but the Navy believes it has breached a power barrier. Scientists at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico tested a new injector on December 20 that produced enough electrons to “generate megawatt-class laser beams for the Navy’s next-generation weapon system.”

The laser works by generating high-energy electrons and passing them through a series of magnetic fields. The result is an “intense emission of laser light,” meaning a super cool death ray that can burn through just about anything.

“The injector performed as we predicted all along,” said Dr. Dinh Nguyen, senior project leader for the laser program. “But until now, we didn’t have the evidence to support our models. We were so happy to see our design, fabrication and testing efforts finally come to fruition. We’re currently working to measure the properties of the continuous electron beams, and hope to set a world record for the average current of electrons.”

The breakthrough is the next step in a long path toward producing a line of megawatt-class superlasers for all of the Navy’s defense vessels. Like many programs of its type, the plan to put a giant laser beam on every ship began in the 1980s, likely after a group of officers saw Star Wars and thought it was super awesome.

Here is a video the Office of Naval Research released, courtesy of PhysOrg.

Jeffrey Van Camp
Former Digital Trends Contributor
As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more