Fundamental Physical Science

The process of detecting light—whether with our eyes, cameras or other devices—is at the heart of a wide range of civilian and military applications, including light or laser detection and ranging (LIDAR or LADAR), photography, astronomy, quantum information processing, medical imaging, microscopy and communications. But even the most advanced detectors of photons—the massless, ghostlike packets of energy that are the fundamental units of light—are imperfect, limiting their effectiveness. Scientists suspect that the performance of light-based applications could improve by orders of magnitude if they could get beyond conventional photon detector designs—perhaps even to the point of being able to identify each and every photon relevant to a given application.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is requesting information on the state-of-the-art in experimentally observing, modeling and understanding communication between biosystems exploiting electromagnetic (EM) waves from low frequencies (kHz) to high frequencies (THz).