This tiny fiber-optic plug could make laser weapons battlefield-ready

This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology. The most critical component to actually fielding high-energy laser weapons at scale isn’t the diode pump, or the gain medium, or the beam director. It isn’t even the power source. In reality, it may actually be this tiny fiber-optic converter. On July 23, defense technology company Attalon—formed earlier this year from the spin-off of American laser…