Military fiber laser specialist Nufern wins military contracts for 46 weapons-grade fiber laser amplifiers

摘要

Military fiber laser specialist Nufern in East Granby, Conn., won contracts to build 46 compact fiber laser amplifiers with power stronger than one kilowatt for several government weapons-grade laser projects, company of-ficials say. To produce a weapons-grade system, laser output power must be increased without intro-ducing additional optical phase noise and modal instability. Tens of subapertures, each driven with a multi-kilowatt coherently com-binable fiber laser amplifier, even-tually could enable 100-kilowatt-class laser systems for precision strikes against ground and air targets. Coherently combinable single-mode fiber-based systems can provide overall laser effi- ciencies greater than 35 percent, while maintaining near-diffrac-tion-limited beam quality.