Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd.

Yehonatan Segev

Dan Vadim Regelman

Shay Yosub

Yochay Swirski

Yan Itovich

A directed energy weapon includes a number of laser units, each including a fiber laser generating an output beam with a power of at least 1 kW from a fiber, an objective lens arrangement for focusing the output beam into a focused beam directed towards a target, and a fine adjustment mechanism for adjusting a direction of the focused beam. A beam deflector arrangement is deployed to deflect a portion of the focused beam from each laser unit as a deflected beam in a direction in predefined relation to a direction of the focused beam. An angle sensing unit generates an output indicative of a current direction of said deflected beam for each of said laser units. A controller actuates the fine adjustment mechanisms based on the output from the angle sensing unit to maintain a desired relative alignment between directions of the focused beams.

Directed energy weapon

The invention is a method and apparatus for creating mode division multiplexed channels capable of integration into photonic integrated circuits with direct spatial separation at the receiver end, thus removing the need for a DMUX module or at least significantly simplifying it. This is achieved by using a set of actuators that induce controllable mode mixing in a multi-mode fiber (MMF) at the transmitter in such a way that spatially separated channels are achieved at the receiver. As a result, no DMUX is required and failure of a single channel does not cause total communication link failure as occurs in links implemented with MUX/DMUX.

Mode division multiplexing optical link

The invention relates to adaptive optics techniques applied to alter the modal structure of light propagating in an optical fiber. In particular the invention relates to altering the modal structure in a multimode beam propagating in a multimode fiber by lowering the number of higher modes. The method comprises combining a wavefront sensor and/or a power sensor with a phase control actuator and actuator control algorithms, to alter the phase structure of the beam thereby to eliminate higher modes. The corrected beam can be then effectively coupled into a smaller diameter fiber with minimum loss of energy and concentrated to smaller spot sizes limited by diffraction.

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Haifa, Israel

Yehonatan Segev