Laser Labs Go Back to the Future

George Neil and Bob Yamamoto don’t remem­ber exactly where they were when they found out that the Pentagon was can­cel­ing their laser can­non project. But they remem­ber how they felt.
It was 1988, and Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” anti-​​missile effort was in its death-​​spiral. Their employer, the defense con­trac­tor TRW, was com­pet­ing against Boeing in an increas­ingly rococo effort to build a Free Electron Laser, or FEL, that would knock mis­siles out of the sky. But, after a half-​​billion dol­lars of invest­ment, the laser in Neil and Yamamoto’s lab was peak­ing out at 11 watts a tenth of what a light bulb gen­er­ates, and a bil­lionth of what the Pentagon would need. That didn’t stop com­pany exec­u­tives from promis­ing that a weapon was right around the cor­ner. “It was like a game of liar’s poker,” Neil recalls. “We kept hop­ing some san­ity would pre­vail. It never did.“
So there was a cer­tain amount of relief when the Pentagon finally pulled the plug as well as anger, and regret. Both Neil and Yamamoto believed in the FEL. Given a shot, they thought, the laser really could stop a rogue mis­sile. Along the way, the break­throughs required in high energy physics and optics and super­con­duc­tiv­ity would have far-​​reaching ben­e­fits, even if an ICBM never got zapped. Neil espe­cially hated how reck­less promises and pol­i­tick­ing and killed that chance. As news of the can­cel­la­tion sank in, the two col­leagues and friends each inde­pen­dently made a promise to him­self: If I ever get to build a laser weapon again, next time, it’s going to be done right.
My arti­cle in the upcom­ing issue of Popular Science is about Neil and Yamamoto’s attempts to stick to that promise, and build lasers that could actu­ally be used for bat­tle.
Ironically, both men have reached back into energy weapons’ his­tory to accom­plish their goals. In the vine­yards of north­ern California, Bob Yamamoto is con­struct­ing a solid state laser with enor­mous crys­tals at its core the same way the very first lasers did, back the 1960s. 2,700 miles away, in the forests of south­ern Virginia, George Neil is putting together a modern-​​day FEL. It doesnt need any sort of mate­r­ial what­so­ever to kick­start its reac­tion. Instead, the machine relies on a stream of elec­trons just like the laser he and Yamamoto worked on nearly a quarter-​​century ago.
UPDATE 11:27 AM: Here’s a video of Neil’s FEL at work, cor­ing a hole in a plex­i­glass brick.
UPDATE 11:42 AM: For years, chemical-​​powered lasers were seen as the only viable alter­na­tive for weapons-​​strength ray guns. The most promis­ing of those sys­tems, the Tactical High Energy Laser, suc­cess­fully shot down dozens of rock­ets and mor­tars. (this video shows it in action.) But gen­er­at­ing the THEL’s megawatts of laser power required hun­dreds of gal­lons of toxic chem­i­cals eth­yl­ene, nitro­gen tri­flu­o­ride. The weapons grew bulky (the small-​​scale ver­sion was only sup­posed to be kept in a mere right cargo con­tain­ers, each 40 feet long). Worse, after a few shots, the lasers would have to be resup­plied with a fresh batch of reac­tants. The logis­tics of haul­ing those tox­ins either through the air or across a bat­tle­field made gen­er­als shiver. So, ulti­mately, inter­est swung back to solid state sys­tems, like Yamamoto’s, and, to a lesser extent, free elec­tron lasers.
UDPATE 04/​14/​06 11:33 AM: I know some folks were hav­ing trou­ble check­ing out those videos. PopSci now has ‘em posted in a more watch­able for­mat.

April 12th, 2006 | Lasers and Ray Guns | 31419 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/04/12/laser-labs-go-back-to-the-future/Laser+Labs+Go+Back+to+the+Future2006-04-12+16%3A11%3A16david_axe You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.