New sensor protection technologies to mitigate threat of growing laser designators and Directed Energy Weapons

In recent years, high power fiber and semiconductor laser technology has improved rapidly, with power density increasing by an order of magnitude or more. Much of this increase has been driven by demand for industrial cutting machines and high-bandwidth, long-range telecommunications. These same laser materials and devices can also be used as directed energy weapons against personnel and electro-optical and infrared (EO/IR) sensors. Purposeful laser strikes on aircraft have increased rapidly over the last decade. In 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that hostile forces have been lasing American planes with laser pointers at a growing rate and these irradiance incidents have the potential to affect the operation of EO/IR sensors.

Military forces worldwide are increasingly using lasers for many purposes including, range finding, anti-missile systems, target designation, ranging of guided munitions and the neutralizing of enemy weapon systems. Therefore soldiers and military vehicles like tanks have also become vulnerable to laser attacks. Militaries are also planning to employ laser directed energy weapons in the battlefield to neutralize rockets, UAVs and missiles.

Lasers are a source of collimated, monochromatic, coherent light that can travel long distances with very little loss of intensity. This coherent property is what allows a laser to maintain a narrow, high-powered beam over long distances. This is also the cause of lasers being able to do damage to sensors, facilities, and personnel at a long range.  Military Lasers can also causes damage to optical components like mirrors, fibers, nonlinear crystal materials, prisms, optical filters, optical modulators and saturable absorbers, photodetectors and SESAMs.

Small, lightweight, high-energy laser systems are a reality today due to decades of research activity. High power, small footprint lasers enable deployment of mobile and transportable high-energy laser systems. The small form factor makes these systems easy to disguise and bring into environments without detection. For example, such systems could be hidden in a delivery van or in a truck carrying supplies. Small lasers could be hidden in a backpack and carried into public venues. Given these advances in laser technology, there exists a need for low SWaP laser detection systems that are easily transportable and work in both day and night conditions to alert personnel of active lasing.

Therefore military forces involved in multinational operations are increasingly looking for technologies both for protection of eye as well as optical components from lasers used by both friendly and foe. Keeping pace with rapidly advancing and eminently available laser technology requires a sophisticated and pragmatic countervailing response.