Attochron Technologies

Ultrashort optical pulses are generally defined as having a pulsewidth (time length) of pico- (10-12), femto- (10-15), atto- (10-18), or zepto- (10-21) -seconds. This is a improvement leap of over one million times over today’s common nanosecond (10-9) lasers. Besides making ultrafast lasers the fastest devices invented by humans, the short time period creates an extremely broad spectrum in the individual pulses – as much as 10 to 100 times greater. Both the short pulses and the broad spectrum improve sensing, data communications and propagation (getting through the weather) abilities by orders of magnitude.

Attochron and its university partners have demonstrated that ultrafast optics can overcome the final challenge to all wireless telecommunications systems: weather conditions.  Fog, clouds and rain hinder state-of-the-art FSO and Radio Frequency (RF) technologies because the droplets of water are about the same size as the wavelengths of light and RF. For lasers, the pulses of previous systems are stretched out in time, relative to ultrafast lasers, giving the water in the air more of a chance to interfere with the signals.

But like the different quantum physics encountered in the world of the very small: nano-technology, an ultrashort laser pulse – with a pulse duration at least a million times shorter than previous lasers -- exhibits different behavior than previous or ‘classical’ FSO systems, even at the same wavelength (1550nm). Attochron and its partners have proven that unique ultrafast optical techniques will allow the LRL™ signal to penetrate fog and clouds many times better than existing systems. And as the energy savings in Attochron systems is exponential, the performance will increase as the weather gets worse. Attochron R&D has been published & presented at SPIE LASE 2007 and SPIE 2008 Defense & Security Symposium in post-deadline and invited sessions respectively.

Attochron's LRL™ will benefit commercial, military and disaster recovery telecommunications networks by providing the first highly-available (all-weather), scalable, rapidly-deployed (hours), IP-compatible optical network element to serve global exponential network growth. Attochron’s communications solutions are designed to be fully compatible with, and transparent to, today's standard WDM and IP networks. Primary customers include the entire business community, remote military commanders, and space agencies.

Technical Papers

Enhanced performance of low-power (<60mW) femtosecond free space optical communication system over conventional CW operation
Author(s): John Cabaniss, Georgia Institute of Technology; Thomas M. Chaffee, Attochron, LLC Free-Space Laser Communication Technologies XIX and Atmospheric Propagation of Electromagnetic Waves. Edited by Mecherle, Steve; Korotkova, Olga. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 6457, pp. 64570X (2007).

Download - Attochron_SPIE 1_ 2007_LRL.pdf

Enhanced performance for ultrafast lasers in heavy scattering medium, experimental evidence for theoretical predictions
Author(s): John Cabaniss, Georgia Institute of Technology; Thomas M. Chaffee, Attochron, LLC Atmospheric Propagation V, Conference 6951 - Proceedings of SPIE Volume 695, Dates: Tuesday-Thursday 18 - 20 March 2008

Download - Attochron_SPIE_Defense_2008_Paper .pdf