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You can’t hide from quantum radar

Radar jamming planes like this one have a healthy future, if the author's skepticism is to be believed.

Radar is, broadly speaking, the standard way to recognize and identify incoming objects. Aircraft and ships usually broadcast a signal that identifies them anyway, but even in the absence of that signal, you still want to ensure that you accurately identify passing aircraft—and not by the wreckage they leave after you have shot them down.

This is also critical because the approaching aircraft could broadcast a signature that makes it look innocent when, in fact, it isn't. This form of sophisticated jamming would be very difficult to detect using a standard radar system. When you add the magic of quantum, however, life suddenly becomes a lot harder for the jammer.

The nice thing about an imaging radar system is that you can get the speed, direction, and the shape of the object from different aspects of the signal. The doppler shift on the radar signal gives you speed, the time between sending a pulse and receiving the scattered radiation at your detector gives you distance. The signal intensity from several detectors allows you to create an image. And repeated measurements tell you where the object is going as well as the speed again.

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A new take on an old instrument: adding fiber to find hidden details on surfaces

As some of you may know, I have recently made the move from optics, lasers, and fun, to... um... surface science, chemistry and, well other kinds of fun. As far as I am concerned, the difficult thing about surfaces is figuring out what is going on. Everything that you are interested in is happening within one layer of atoms, and that presents some challenges. One technique that we worked with very early is called ellipsometry. Ellipsometry has a very simple recipe: take light with a very well defined polarization, reflect that light off the surface, and measure the polarization of the reflected light. You can use the change in polarization to determine what is on the surface.

In practice, however, ellipsometry suffers from a significant challenge: getting polarized light anywhere near the surfaces we want to understand. In complete ignorance and with the confidence that entails, my response was "bugger this, just run the light through an optical fiber." The ellipsometry people I suggested this to stared at me as if I had grown a nipple on my forehead.

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