GALCIT Colloquium

Aero-Optics is the study of all the nasty stuff that can happen to a laser beam when it passes through turbulence caused by air flowing past turrets on aircraft.  This nasty stuff can impose huge system performance penalties on airborne lasers being used for any number of applications.  The seminar will start at the end of my photon odyssey and then return to its beginning.  The end is an introduction to Notre Dame's Airborne Aero-Optics Laboratory (AAOL), a transonic airborne test bed for collecting aero-optics data and performing "beam-control" experiments in real time.  But most of the seminar will discuss conundrums that have come up along the way starting with the very first high temporal bandwidth wavefronts ever collected for a laser propagating through a Mach 0.8 separated shear layer.  I will close the seminar with some intriguing, still-ongoing fundamental work.