Enlarge (credit: US Department of Defense)
The Department of Defense’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Development Program (JNLWD) is closing in on a directed energy weapon that can literally tell people to go away—creating sound waves with laser pulses that can annoy, frighten, or otherwise send the message to people approaching a military unit that getting closer is not a good idea.
The Non-Lethal Laser-Induced Plasma Effect (NL-LIPE) system can be used to manipulate air molecules, creating a ball of plasma that oscillates to create sound waves with a stream of femtosecond-long laser bursts. A first laser creates the plasma ball, and a second then oscillates the plasma ball to create the sound. As Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports, the current Laser-Induced Plasma Effect implementation can only manage an indistinguishable mumble—though it can create a wide variety of very distinguishable sounds, as demonstrated in the video below.
A video of the Laser-Induced Plasma Effect in action.
David Law, JNLWD’s Technology Division Chief, believes that, within the next three years, the system will be able to create intelligible speech from a glowing ball of plasma hovering in the air at a distance. “We’re this close to getting it to speak to us,” Law told Tucker. “I need three or four more kilohertz.”
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Non-Lethal Weapon: DOD seeks to use lasers to create shouting will-o-the-wisp