One of the problems with stealth aircraft is that they are designed primarily to hide from radar, but not from light. Here you might ask: What if the missile searched for them with light instead of radio waves?
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This is the question that a team of Chinese researchers attempted to answer in a new study, proposing to equip missiles with a highly sensitive "single-photon lidar" system that could theoretically detect a stealth aircraft from tens of kilometers away.
The remarkable result, according to the study, was that the system could, under ideal conditions, detect the aircraft from a distance of up to 61.5 kilometers at night, and decrease to about 27.7 kilometers during the day.
The big difference between night and day is due to sunlight. A detector trying to find a few photons reflected from an aircraft finds itself in the middle of a huge stream of background photons during the day, while the search becomes much easier in the dark.
In the new technology, the sensitivity becomes so extreme that the device can record extremely small numbers of photons, which are particles of light, hence the name "single-photon lidar".
There is another, more fundamental problem: the laser beam is very narrow, so knowing that the system can see the aircraft from 60 kilometers away does not mean that it can initially find it in a vast expanse of sky.
Therefore, its true value may be in the final stage of the engagement, after radars or other sensors have given it an approximate location of the target.
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science