Navy Reports Breakthrough with "Game Changing" Laser

The U.S. Navy has billed it as a game changing weapons project and now a research breakthrough at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico may mean that weaponization is no longer a theory.

The Free Electron Laser (FEL) program, as it's known, is designed to let Navy ships use laser beams to knock out enemy air and sea targets. For the laser to work as billed, the system will need to produce 100 kilowatts of power; until now, researchers had only been able to get the laser to generate 14 kilowatts, hardly enough to bother a belligerent sea gull. But now Los Alamos engineers say they have developed a new injector that can generate "megawatt-class laser beams" for the next-generation weapon system.

Here's how the Navy explained it:

"The injector performed as we predicted all along," said Dr. Dinh Nguyen, senior project leader for the FEL program at the lab. "But until now, we didn't have the evidence to support our models. We were so happy to see our design, fabrication and testing efforts finally come to fruition. We're currently working to measure the properties of the continuous electron beams, and hope to set a world record for the average current of electrons."

The first tests are slated for completion by 2018.