How Can Additive White Gaussian Noise Make Directed Energy Weapons More Powerful?

An enemy target is in sight. With its location confirmed, an extremely powerful and highly focused electromagnetic energy beam (e.g., a high-power laser) is emitted to incapacitate or destroy the adversarial force. This is the mission objective of directed energy weapons (DEW).

In a DEW system, various laser modules combine into a singular beam. While upping each module’s power elevates the output power of the entire system, it can also trigger Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS). SBS leads to a damaging and intense reflection along the fiber-optic cabling that stops DEW from reaching their highest level of performance in terms of output power.

In this post, learn how noise signals can solve SBS challenges and enable efficient, optimized, and powerful high energy lasers.