Fiber lasers with high power appear as a ground-breaking technology

Optical scientists have found a new way to significantly increase the power of fiber lasers while maintaining their beam quality, making them a future key defense technology against low-cost drones and for use in other applications such as remote sensing.

Researchers from the University of South Australia (UniSA), the University of Adelaide (UoA) and Yale University have demonstrated the potential use of multimode optical fiber to scale up the power in fiber lasers by three to nine times, but without degrading the beam quality so that it can focus on distant targets.

The breakthrough is published in Nature communication.

Co-author Dr. Linh Nguyen, a researcher at UniSA’s Future Industries Institute, says the new approach will allow industry to continue to squeeze extremely high power out of fiber lasers, making them more useful for the defense industry and for remote sensing applications and gravitational wave detection.

“High-power fiber lasers are essential in manufacturing and defense, and increasingly so with the proliferation of low-cost, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) on modern battlefields,” says Dr. Nguyen.

“A swarm of cheap drones can quickly drain the missile resource, leaving military assets and vehicles with depleted firepower for more combat-critical missions. High-power fiber lasers, with their extremely low cost per shot and speed-of-light action, are the only viable defense solution in the long run .

“This is known as asymmetric advantage: a cheaper approach can defeat a more expensive, high-tech system by playing the big numbers.”

By providing an asymmetric advantage, this advanced capability has the potential to provide a strong deterrent effect that aligns well with the objectives of the Defense Strategic Review and AUKUS Pillar 2 objectives.

Dr. Ori Henderson-Sapir, project researcher at the UoA’s Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing, says Australia has a long history of developing innovative fiber optic technologies.

“Our research launches Australia into a world-leading position to develop the next generation of high-power fiber lasers, not just for defense applications, but to aid new scientific discoveries.”

The researchers have demonstrated the technology in fiber lasers and will report their findings at Photonics West held in San Francisco in early 2024.