Oh now, this looks like fun: Inside Two 'Star Wars' Projects. Looks like ABL might be obsolete (in that it uses a chemical laser) before it ever flies.

What's really interesting in this article, though, is not so much the technology as it is the approach that's being used to develop it. By pursuing reasonable milestones at a measured pace instead of trying to jump to an all-up weapons system from a blank sheet of paper, the Pentagon is having much more success than they did the first time around, and for significantly less money. Granted, the new technology builds on what was developed in the original incarnation of "Star Wars", and technology in general has progressed dramatically in the past fifteen years, but the development strategy is no less sensible for that -- look at what happened with Shuttle, for instance, where a huge all-at-once leap was taken with immature technologies.

And as for applications, it looks like the FEL is already finding potential uses in the chip industry:

The free-electron laser is a special kind of laser with the advantage that its beam can be tuned through a wide range of frequencies in much the same way that you can dial up different frequencies on a radio.

Because the silicon/hydrogen system has been intensively studied, the researchers knew the strength of the bond between the silicon and hydrogen atoms. The bonds between atoms act something like an atomic spring. Like tiny springs, they tend to vibrate at certain frequencies and are most likely to absorb light photons that vibrate at these frequencies. As a result, light tuned to these "resonant" frequencies can force the bond to break.

...and possibly the always-on-the-horizon fusion power industry:

They also tested the system on silicon surfaces covered with a mixture of hydrogen and deuterium. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen: Instead of the single proton that hydrogen has as a nucleus, deuterium has a proton and a neutron. It has the same chemical characteristics as hydrogen but it weighs about twice as much. This weight difference means that the silicon-deuterium bond vibrates more slowly than the silicon-hydrogen bond, so the resonant wavelength is very different than for hydrogen-silicon.

Posted by T.L. James on May 21, 2006 10:20 PM