Canadian high-energy laser pointer technology made a disruptive breakthrough

The Canadian Army continues to pay attention to the field of laser technology and has made greater progress. In fact, high-energy laser pointer technology has been widely used in welding. There are also other types of laser tools in the Canadian Army Arsenal, such as rangefinders, target capture systems, and visual alarm systems.

At the end of the 1960s, defense researchers in Quebec City, Canada made a disruptive breakthrough in the field of laser technology and developed a laser called CO2-TEA, which is used in many industries. The Canadian National Defense Research and Development Center is studying potential high-energy laser technology.

The Canadian Army focuses on finding safer ways to deal with threats such as improvised explosive devices, unexploded ordnance and drones. The advantage of high-energy laser is to eliminate threats in time while protecting soldiers from harm. Its effective distance ranges from several meters to several hundred meters.

Large-scale attosecond scientific devices such as X-ray free electron lasers require precise synchronization of dozens of lasers and microwave sources on the system level at the level of attosecond level. The synchronization span exceeds several kilometers.” For this reason, scientists developed A set of optical timing synchronization system is adopted, and the mode-locked green laser pointer pulse sequence with extremely low noise is used as the timing signal. Through a stable optical fiber link, the timing signal is transmitted from the central base station to each terminal over a long distance, achieving high precision for the terminal laser and microwave source. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first long-distance synchronization of lasers and microwave oscillators under 1 femtosecond in the world.

The timing synchronization system of the free electron laser and the attosecond precision laser-microwave network will enable the next generation of X-ray free electron lasers and other attosecond large scientific devices to achieve their full potential. In addition, other high-precision time resolution requirements Applications such as ultra-stable optical clocks, gravitational wave detection, coherent optical antenna arrays, etc. can also benefit from this technology. All experiments of this project were completed in CFEL’s low-noise laser laboratory. CFEL is a cooperative organization of DESY, Hamburg University and Max Planck Institute. DESY, MIT and the University of Hamburg have jointly participated in this research project.