Leonardo gets U.S. Army deal for powerful diode lasers

The U.S. Army has awarded Leonardo Electronics US $30.1 million to keep developing a way to combine the light from many small semiconductor lasers into a single, more powerful beam, the U.S. Department of War announced.

The modification to an existing research contract covers work to develop, study and scale up the power emitted in one beam from a phase-locked semiconductor diode laser array. Leonardo will do the work at its laser plant in Tucson, Arizona, and is scheduled to finish by March 29, 2029. The Army obligated the full amount at award from fiscal 2026 research and development funds. Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, is managing the contract.

The announcement did not say what power level the Army is aiming for or what weapon or sensor the technology is meant to feed.

A laser diode is a chip-sized semiconductor laser, the same basic technology found in fiber-optic links and laser pointers, scaled up for industrial and military use. A single diode puts out limited power. Engineers can stack many emitters together, but their light normally adds up as a wide, messy glow that is hard to focus at long range.

Phase-locking tackles that problem. When every emitter in an array is forced to fire in step, their light waves line up and combine into one tight beam. That would let diodes produce a usable high-power beam on their own. Today, high-energy military lasers typically use diodes only as a “pump,” feeding energy into a separate fiber or crystal laser that shapes the final beam.

Leonardo Electronics US, a subsidiary of Italy’s Leonardo, was formerly known as Lasertel. It makes semiconductor wafers, laser diode packages and beam-shaping optics in Tucson, and says it is the leading supplier of pump diodes for military targeting systems. The company supplies laser systems for U.S. platforms including the AH-64 Apache helicopter and the F-35 fighter. Its Tucson diodes cover wavelengths from 760 to 1,700 nanometers, with peak power of up to several kilowatts.

Leonardo has worked on directed energy research for the U.S. military before. In 2017, it won a Phase I contract of just over $1 million under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Efficient Ultra-Compact Laser Integrated Devices program, known as EUCLID, to build lighter diode pump sources for fiber lasers used in laser weapons.

The contract number shows the original award dates to fiscal 2024.