At the end of 2013, the United Nations General Assembly designated 2015 as the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies (IYL 2015). And what could be more worthy of celebration than light?
“Light plays a vital role in our daily lives and is an imperative cross-cutting discipline of science in the 21st century,” notes the IYL web site. “It has revolutionized medicine, opened up international communications via the Internet, and continues to be central to linking cultural, economic and political aspects of the global society.”
DARPA could not agree more. “We at DARPA have always been big fans of light,” said Stefanie Tompkins, Director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “Light is one of the most important and versatile phenomena that DARPA program managers can leverage when they are trying to develop technologies for national security.”
In celebration of the International Year of Light, DARPA has produced a short video featuring five program managers, each of whom is taking light to the extreme as a means of exploring various technological frontiers:
Prem Kumar – PULSE—Program in Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering
Justin Sanchez – NEURO-FAST—Neuro Function, Activity, Structure, and Technology
Predrag Milojkovic – REVEAL—Revolutionary Enhancement of Visibility by Exploiting Active Light-fields
William “Dev” Palmer – THz Electronics Program
John Main – Atoms to Product Program
We hope these vignettes will help bring into focus the many pivotal roles that light plays in our world, and will tantalize you with some of the new capabilities that the harnessing of light could make possible in the future.