Award Data

ABSTRACT: A system that operates at room temperature and that could scan for concealed weapons from standoff distances of >10 m would be a tremendous asset for US military homeland security personnel worldwide. THz imaging can, potentially, be used for this application, but it requires the development of a new class of THz detectors whereby the signal to noise ratios are improved significantly. ...

The Navy has need of assessing the river environment including bathymetry, flow velocity profile, and navigational obstructions. While improvements in measurement fidelity and reduction in cost have come about by the use of multiple drifters, measurement quality is lost due to convergent drifter trajectories, and cost/risk remains high due to personnel effort required for deployment. An autonomous ...

Non-invasive, stealthy nature of passive remote sensing combined with its low cost make passive techniques a promising supplement or replacement of traditional active remote sensing techniques. Coherent processing of diffuse wave fields has a proven potential for remote sensing of stationary environments. The proposed research extends noise interferometry to characterization of dynamic environment ...

This proposal addresses key open challenges identified during the LAGR program for the practical use of adaptive, vision-based robot navigation in commercial settings. First, the adaptive vision system learns quickly, but forgets as quickly. This will be addressed by using an ensemble of "expert" classifiers, each of which specializes for a particular environment and can be quickly activated when ...

Quantitative predictions of reactive flow dynamics from large-scale simulations of Liquid Rocket Engines (LRE) appear to be model dependent. Relationships and coupling among the dominant mechanisms most responsible for destabilization are obscured by the complexities of the model and subtle consequences of inherent ad hoc approximations not supported by mathematical rationale. The reliability of ...

This STTR Phase I project will develop a novel toxic material storage bag with an inner liner capable of decontaminating chemical and biological warfare agents (CBWA’s).. The inner-liner technology would entail adsorption and decomposition of warfare agents without the release of toxic agents, and will result in a storage bag capable of being disposed of in an environmentally safe fashion. The ...

We propose to develop ultradense plasmonic integrated devices and circuits for optical interconnect compatible with the electronic circuitry. In our proposal, we will employ engineered metallic nanostructures that combine energy concentration by plasmonic lenses and retardation-based plasmonic resonances to even further boost the efficiency of materials exhibiting optical nonlinearity. These plas ...

The goal of this program is to develop devices that can detect small electric fields over large frequency ranges while being compact and power efficient. We propose an electro-optic resonant plasmon that enhances the electro-optic phase shift in a small volume (

Quantum cryptography, and in particular Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a secure method to distribute a secret key between two distant authorized partners whose security is based on the laws of physics. Current public key cryptosystems have not been proven to be secure and are based on the computational complexity of evaluating one-way functions. These functions are easily evaluated, but extrem ...

SA Photonics and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are please to propose the development of MIMO SAR/GMTI techniques. The approach is to leverage the extensive amount of research that has been conducted in an academic setting and to assess the feasibility of the transition of these techniques into system of practical interest.