AFOSR helping to solve 30-year-old dilemma Published June 29, 2006 By Erin Crawley Air Force Office of Scientific Research Public Affairs ARLINGTON, Va. (AFPN) -- A team of researchers supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research has made a breakthrough in electric oxygen iodine laser, or EOIL, research. The results were presented at the AFOSR Molecular Dynamics Program Review here in June. "We have been looking at a problem that has been bugging the scientific community for about 30 years and decided a few years ago that we would try to solve it," said Wayne Solomon, one of the principal investigators on the research team that made the breakthrough. "It is a way to take oxygen, just plain oxygen, out of a discharge unit," said Mr. Solomon, who is aerospace engineering professor emeritus from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign in Urbana, Ill. "You are basically discharging something like air," he said. "We converted that to an excited species, basically excited oxygen. We then took that energy and preserved it so that we could transfer it to an atomic iodine species. Then, we put mirrors on it and made the laser. "We are now in the process of trying to look at the details of the chemistry of the plasma and to try to improve it in such a way that it will essentially be a much more efficient high-energy laser than the types flying on airplanes today," Mr. Solomon said. Mr. Solomon predicted this basic research technology will transition in a couple of years. "The small companies are working on the technology transition while the universities are plugging away to try to fill in all the interesting research gaps," he said. Oxygen plasmas have a variety of potential applications to Air Force technology and particularly lasers. Mr. Solomon's research mostly is directed toward understanding specific oxygen-iodine plasmas and how they can be applied to high-energy systems for the Air Force. The team's work is currently supported by AFOSR through the High Energy Laser Multidisciplinary Research Initiative, or HEL MRI, funded by the Joint Technology Office. Mr. Solomon's team is working on high-energy EOILs. Other research institutions involved in this HEL MRI include Emory University, Iowa State University, the Air Force Institute of Technology and three private companies. Potentially, this technology could have a large impact on Air Force systems, particularly the airborne laser program, in addition to other tactical uses of lasers. More than 90 researchers and scientists attended the AFOSR 2006 Contractors' Meeting in Molecular Dynamics. Organizations represented included the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Va.; the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; and BioTools Inc. Dozens of researchers from universities worldwide included the Universität Göttingen in Germany and the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.