Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

In the last decade, civil aviation authorities worldwide have reported a tremendous increase in laser attacks on aircraft. Laser illuminations in aviation pose serious safety and security risks with significant implications to both air passengers and flight and general aviation related staff. The laser illumination risks create a new regulatory and policy need that can further stretch the existing limited resources and budgets in order to deal with this serious concern. Such laser interference incidents have rapidly increased in numbers due to the recent ease of access to powerful, cheap, hand-held & portable lasers over the internet. The goal of this project is to develop a platform thin film filter technology called METAIR that can be adhesively applied on the inner surface of an aircraft's cockpit glass window and block any laser beams of predetermined light wavelengths. Large-scale METAIR films will be superior to existing inadequate laser filtering solutions and reasonably cheap to fabricate, providing passive, hassle-free laser protection.The filtering mechanism relies on the physical principles of photonic crystal bandgap and plasmonic absorption, which have been shown by researchers to selectively filter light. These principles have been studied in academic environments, but there have not been harnessed on a commercial scale to create widely available products. In this program we plan to use lithographic and chemical fabrication methods such as e-beam lithography, sol-gel, thermal annealing, and glancing angle deposition, in order to take advantage of these filtering principles, expand their scope and create the platform filtering technology METAIR.The program is collaboration between an advanced systems engineering company (LamdaGuard) and three research groups in two New Brunswick universities (Université de Moncton and University of New Brunswick). It will provide training for three doctoral graduate students and two post-doctoral research assistants over the two year period,