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Atmospheric Propagation of High-Energy Laser Beams

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Directed Energy Weapons

Abstract

Starting from the invention of LASER in the early 1960s, laser radiation propagation in the atmosphere has been the subject of intensive research. The high spatial and time coherence of laser sources makes their application attractive for communication, location, geodesy, and high-energy transmission over long distances. Laser sources are widely used for exploring the atmosphere, in particular, its gas composition and pollution, velocities of air and sea flows, and features of the land and sea surface.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The treatment of binary (one-on-one) interactions in terms of cross sections is common in physics and will be used throughout this book. A good discussion of the cross-sectional concept can be found in Chapter II of Reference [32].

  2. 2.

    A good summary of absorption as a function of frequency, adequate for zero-order analysis, can be found in Section 14, “Optical Properties of the Atmospheric” in Reference [33].

  3. 3.

    Figure 8.6 is a plot of the expression \( {\displaystyle {\int}_0^zK(z)\mathrm{d}z}=\left[K(0){h}_0/ \sin \phi \right]\left[- \exp \left(-z \sin \phi /{h}_0\right)\right] \)

  4. 4.

    Figure 8.8 is adapted from figures found in C. E. Junge, Air Chemistry and Radioactivity (New York: Academic Press, 1963), and n J. E. Manson’s article in S.L. Valley (ed), Handbook of Geophysics and Space Environments (Hanscom AFB: Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, 1965).

  5. 5.

    A number of representative curves, along with references to the original literature, can be found in Born and Wolf Reference [36].

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  1. Galaxy Advanced Engineering, Inc., Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Bahman Zohuri

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Zohuri, B. (2016). Atmospheric Propagation of High-Energy Laser Beams. In: Directed Energy Weapons. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31289-7_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31289-7_8

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