The bi-annual Laser World of Photonics exhibition and its accompanying tech conference, World of Photonics Congress 2019, opened on Monday, June 24, at Messe Munchen in Munich, Germany, and as in years past it filled five large exhibition halls, with the Congress occupying another hall and the conference center.

On the battlefield, you need to know as much as possible.

Argonne National Laboratory and the Air Force Research Laboratory developed a new numerical modeling tool that allows for a better understanding of rotating detonation engines (RDEs). Unlike conventional gas turbine engines, RDEs leverage high-intensity, self-sustaining detonation to rapidly consume the fuel-air mixture, typically in a ring-shaped, cylindrical chamber.

Landing multi-rotor drones smoothly is difficult. Complex turbulence is created by the airflow from each rotor bouncing off the ground as the ground grows closer during descent. Drones typically wobble and inch slowly toward a landing until power is finally cut and they drop the remaining distance to the ground.

Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment Alex Beehler doesn't need proof of threats to military and government installations. He is reminded every day. His office sits next to the point of impact where American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the western side of the Pentagon nearly 18 years ago during the 9/11 attacks. As the variety and complexity of threats continue to increase, security at U.S. military installations has taken increased importance in the years since 9/11.

Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) discovered a new method to passivate defects in next generation optical materials to improve optical quality and enable the miniaturization of light emitting diodes and other optical elements.

The Air Force Research Laboratory, along with research partners at Los Alamos National Laboratory, are working to change the shape of materials technology with a breakthrough development that could open up a new range of possibilities for the military and beyond. The collaborative team has developed a 3-D printed polymer-based foam structure that responds to the force of a shock wave to act as a one-way switch, a long sought-after goal in shock research.

The University of Illinois is leading a NASA-funded project to develop an all-electric aircraft. The project, called the Center for Cryogenic High-Efficiency Electrical Technology for Aircraft (CHEETA), focuses on electrically driven propulsion systems for commercial aircraft.

The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has been working with Raytheon to design efficient, broadband, linear, high-power amplifiers and robust, broadband, low-noise amplifiers for future adaptive, multimodal radar systems. Raytheon has a high-performance, W-band, gallium nitride (GaN) fabrication process and a process design kit (PDK) that ARL used to design low-noise amplifiers, power amplifiers, and other circuits for future radar, communications, and sensor systems. After the first set of ARL and Raytheon designs was submitted for fabrication, test designs of broadband Class A/B power amplifiers were developed. While these designs did not get fabricated in the initial effort, they serve to demonstrate the performance, bandwidth, and capability of this GaN process and could potentially be fabricated in the future.

Tracking and identifying radiation sources in the age of nuclear proliferation and well- resourced non-state actors is a national priority. Current neutron detection methods favor large detector volumes and long data collection times. Additionally, portable neutron detection methods have persistent problems with low signal-to-noise (small pulse height) and require large applied voltages.