These short courses were offered on 2 June 2008 in conjunction with the Solid State and Diode Laser Technology Review, held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Continuing Education Unit (CEU) credits were awarded for completion of these DEPS short courses. Course 1. Beam Directors 101 Classification: FOUO Instructor: Bill Decker, Defense Acquisition University Duration: Full-day course, starts at 0800 Monday, 2 June CEUs awarded: 0.70 Course Description: The course will cover beam directors from the requirements and parameter that determine the overall approach to the development of a strategy to acquire and integrate a beam director into an HEL system. Subjects include:
Intended Audience: Program managers, lead engineers, systems engineers of HEL systems that will include a beam director. A technical background is useful, but not required. Instructor Biography: Mr. Decker is currently a Professor of Systems Engineering at the Huntsville Campus of the Defense Acquisition University. His experience includes over 25 years in electro-optics with ten years experience in high energy laser systems, including THEL, ABL, ATL and HELLADS, all while employed by Brashear (a division of L-3 Communications) in Pittsburgh, PA. Mr. Decker holds a MS in Physics from the Naval Postgraduate School and a BS in Engineering from Cornell University. Course 2. Atmospheric Effects Classification: FOUO Instructor: Steve Fiorino, AFIT Duration: Half-day course, starts at 0800 Monday, 2 June CEUs awarded: 0.35 Course Description: This course addresses how to characterize and quantify the major effects of the atmosphere on directed energy weapons propagation. A first principles atmospheric propagation and characterization code called the Laser Environmental Effects Definition and Reference (LEEDR) is described and demonstrated. In addition to overland cloud-free-line of sight (CFLOS) assessments, LEEDR enables the creation of exportable vertical profiles of temperature, pressure, water vapor, optical turbulence, and atmospheric particulates/hydrometeors as they relate to line-by-line extinction over the UV to RF portion of the spectrum. The course outline is as follows:
- Atmospheric Boundary layer - Molecular Composition - Aerosol Data - Clouds, Rain - Optical Turbulence - Realistic Correlation - Creating Atmospheric Profiles - Figures Intended Audience: US Government personnel and their direct contractors who have program requirements for or are interested in methods and tools to assess realistic environments and environmental effects for modeling and simulation, mission planning, and/or military systems operations. The course assumes the students have some technical background in radiative transfer through the atmosphere--either via an undergraduate degree or career experience. Instructor Biography: Lt Col Fiorino (BS, MS, Ohio State University; MMOAS, Air Command and Staff College; BS, PhD, Florida State University) is currently an assistant professor of atmospheric physics at the Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio. During his career, he has served as wing weather officer, 319th Bomb Wing, Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota; officer in charge, Weather Flight, 806th Bomb Wing (Provisional), during Operation Desert Storm; acquisition systems meteorologist, Wright Laboratory (now the Air Force Research Laboratory), Wright-Patterson AFB; Weather Flight commander, 1st Fighter Wing, Langley AFB, Virginia; and joint meteorological and oceanographic officer, joint task force, Southwest Asia. Lt Col Fiorino is a graduate of Squadron Officer School and Air Command and Staff College. Course 3. Fiber Lasers In Defense: Fibers, Components and System Design Considerations Classification: Unclassified Instructors: Duration: Half-day course, starts at 1300 Monday, 2 June CEUs awarded: 0.35 Course Description: Fiber laser technology has the potential to make a significant impact in various defense applications, from LIDAR and remote sensing through to high energy laser weapons systems. This emerging laser technology offers many intrinsic advantages over traditional DPSSL, as highlighted by widespread publications in the research community demonstrating an impressive array of power scaling results, both CW and pulsed and at wavelengths from 1um to the eyesafe 1.5um and now 2um wavelengths. Obvious advantages associated with the technology are high wallplug efficiency leading to reduced electrical power requirements and easier system cooling, but also robustness, good beam quality and highly flexible system performance coupled with (remote) fiber delivery options make the technology unique in certain applications. The topics to be covered include: an explanation of the basic fiber parameters, double-clad fiber designs and covering such concepts such as large mode area fibers, modal/beam quality, PM fibers etc.; rare earth doping and spectroscopy of Yb-1um, Yb:Er-1550 and Tm-2um; component specifications and availability (couplers, isolators, seed laser diodes etc); limitations to scaling fiber devices, non-linear limitations, damage thresholds, etc.; design rules and concepts for pulsed fiber lasers and amplifier chains, recent results from the literature; and system specifications and the possible application areas, comparison and advantages over other laser technologies. This tutorial will cover the major aspects of designing and building a fiber laser, from the fiber itself through the various state of the art fiber components and discuss the system parameter space that best makes use of the intrinsic advantages of the technology. This course will enable you to:
Intended Audience: The tutorial is designed for researchers interested in investigating this application area but without the detailed knowledge of fibers and fiber based devices. Higher level managers and system designers/integrators will also be interested in the broad comparisons made between the fiber laser technology and current lasers and how this can impact future system designs. Instructor Biographies: Michael O’Connor received his M.S. in Geophysics, and B.S. in Physics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has 12 years of experience in fiber optic and fiber laser development at Spectran Corp., Lucent, and most recently Nufern. He presently manages Applications Engineering for government applications at Nufern, with a focus on high power fiber lasers for directed energy. Michael is a US Army Special Forces veteran. William E. Torruellas received his PhD from the Optical Sciences Center, University of Arizona in 1991. He is currently a member of the Senior professional staff at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. His work addresses the design of High-Energy-Lasers and their system development and field implementation for Directed-Energy-Weapon systems. He is also involved in active remote sensing evaluations. Previously he was Director of Fiber Optronics for Fibertek, focusing his work on double-cladding fiber amplifiers and transferring terrestrial WDM systems technology to the area of IR remote sensing and space based laser systems. Previous industry positions include Corvis and Raytheon; additionally, he was a senior research associate for CREOL and an assistant professor at Washington State University, where he helped establish an inter-departmental M.Sc in Opto-Electronics supported by the National Science Foundation. He has 51 refereed publications and 30 conference proceedings, one awarded patent, 55 invited talks, and 60 contributed oral presentations. He has been involved in the organization of conferences for SPIE and OSA, and has co-edited a book on nonlinear propagation. Course 4. High Power Laser Diode Physics and Technology Classification: Unclassified Instructor: Dennis Deppe, UCF Duration: Half-day course, starts at 1300 Monday, 2 June CEUs awarded: 0.35 Course Description: This short course will review the physics of existing diode laser technology used in high power edge-emitters, and explore the new technology developments on the horizon. It can be shown that much of the existing diode laser technology is limited can close to the maximum performance of the perfect semiconductor materials properties in terms of radiative efficiency, electrical conductivity, and optical loss. However new active materials and cavity designs may bring new advances in efficiency, spectral and spatial beam control, brightness, total power level through increased diode size, and operating wavelengths. These new advances that include the new technologies such as the SCOWL, quantum dot laser diodes, and vertical-cavity surface emitting arrays will also be presented and analyzed for their potential to increase functionality, power, efficiency, and reliability over the current diode laser technologies. Intended Audience: Researchers and managers working in the area of diode laser development for military and commercial systems with general background in lasers. Course will include introduction on basic physics of laser diodes, in addition to more advanced topics of details in design. Instructor Biography: Dennis G. Deppe is a Professor in the College of Optics an Photonics at the University of Central Florida where he holds the Florida Photonics Center of Excellence Endowed Chair in Nanophotonics. His research specialties include optoelectronics, laser physics, epitaxial crystal growth, and quantum optics. His research has included a number of projects in developing new types of semiconductor diode laser technologies, including vertical cavity surface emitting laser diodes, quantum dot laser diodes, and semiconductor microcavity devices. He is an expert on diode laser and semiconductor device physics and his research activities are based on photonic integration for new types of high power laser diodes, high speed interconnects, and quantum information. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has sinced received a number of awards for his research into III-V semiconductor devices. Prof. Deppe is a Fellow of the OSA and the IEEE.
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