Boomtown: How Futuristic Weapons Could Power Albuquerque
Just EAST of downtown Albuquerque, in the basement of a blocky beige University of New Mexico building, sits a machine that looks like a sci-fi piece of industrial equipment. Metal cylinders, painted tan, feed into each other. They’re bolted to shiny metal pieces that flare out into a wider opening that resembles the end of a bazooka.
The mysterious setup is part of UNM’s Directed Energy Center, a program designed to research — and teach students to research — focused electromagnetic radiation, like laser beams and, in this machine’s case, microwaves.
The machine — called Sinus-6 — has the ability to use high voltage to shoot out hundreds of ultra-strong bursts of radiation every second. That capability is useful to fields like fusion and radar research, and at lower levels even testing and imaging materials like concrete and rebar. But energy like Sinus-6’s, when properly harnessed, could theoretically be used to destroy or maim drones, missiles, sensors, satellites, or communication devices.
At a time when many scientists are losing grants, jobs, and even entire research programs, directed energy research — which combines disciplines like electromagnetism, plasma physics, and classical mechanics — has a relatively bright future. That’s largely because the Department of Defense wants to take directed energy weapons from curious dream to operational reality, and some researchers are happy to help do the fundamental scientific and engineering research that leads them there. That connection between defense and science has held true for weapons systems throughout modern history.
And Albuquerque, a desert town arguably better known for its hot-air balloons than for its high-energy research, has emerged as a key place to make directed energy happen.
While DOD hasn’t published the exact figures of its investments, a micro-industry surrounding that research has popped up in the city, some of it government-funded. In addition to UNM, government labs and private companies are working to develop these futuristic arms, offering the city a chance of a boom when other towns that depend heavily on federally funded projects may face a bust.
But Edl Schamiloglu, founding director of the center at UNM, and his students aren’t necessarily focused on the end products that might emerge from their research. They’re simply trying to figure out the basics. Those scientific queries can cover a range of ideas: How can machines efficiently generate and direct energy, without overheating themselves? And how does that energy behave in the world? Is it powerful enough to do harm, or will it fizzle?
One of those students is Christopher Rodriguez, Jr., an undergraduate at UNM. “The first time I saw these machines, I was astounded,” he said. “I didn’t know what they were doing.” And why should he have? He didn’t have any relevant experience. “I only had a year of working at a dollar store,” he said. But he wanted to learn.
In a room nearby, his student-colleague Gabriel Sidebottom scours the internet for a part for one of the high-energy instruments.
Sidebottom has been working here just a few months, so only gets to touch the big machines when they’re not powered on. “They’re trying to get me up to speed fully before they throw me in with the wolves,” Sidebottom said, smiling.
And Rodriguez can give him a good anecdata for that caution. One day, setting up an experiment, he was assembling a lead brick pile and metal panel meant to block radiation. But when they charged up the machine and fired, things didn’t go as planned.
“It sounds like a gunshot,” Rodriguez said.
The directed energy, that day, wasn’t quite as direct as it was supposed to be: Instead of shooting through its coils, it arced up into the metal panel, which Rodriguez had unknowingly positioned too low, leaving a blackened, starlike blast pattern.
But safely learning from mistakes is part of the Directed Energy Center’s goal. The research group is growing the next generation of experts, said Schamiloglu, helping funnel future workers to their funder, the Air Force Research Lab. “They want to see us grow a directed energy ecosystem up and down the Rio Grande corridor,” said Schamiloglu.
The idea of using energy as a weapon is not a new one. “The Greeks used focused sunlight,” said Martin Richardson, director of the Center for Directed Energy at the University of Central Florida, a program similar to UNM’s. According to what may be an apocryphal tale, they fashioned a series of mirrors, back in the 200s B.C., that bounced and honed solar photons — the particles that carry electromagnetic energy — till they bored into Roman ships. That light set the ships aflame, at least if later reports are to be believed. Today, this contraption is colloquially known as Archimedes’ death ray.
Like this maybe-real weapon, today’s directed energy pursuits are largely focused on disrupting objects on the move: drones, satellites, missiles. Modern weapons could also melt a hole in metal, fry a sensor, fool a guidance system, or jam electronics. The U.S. military’s R&D on these weapons concentrates on material and infrastructure, according to congressional research reports.
That is to say, directed energy research isn’t currently keyed in on using photons to harm humans. For microwaves, the power level that negatively affects electronics is far below what humans can even perceive or that can damage their bodies. There has been some research on systems that cause temporary pain — like a heating sensation in the top layer of the skin — to deny people access to a given area without causing lasting biological damage. For lasers, international law prohibits systems that are designed to cause blindness.
Today’s directed energy pursuits are largely focused on disrupting objects on the move: drones, satellites, missiles.
The Defense Department is primarily, though, interested in using the technology to try to defend against drone or missile attacks, take out surveillance apparati, and prevent machinery from working as it should, according to a 2024 technology development document and prototypes. And while weapons that can do those things haven’t yet been used much in the real world, that could soon change.
In a recent webinar titled “Is Directed Energy (Finally) Going to War?” experts, hosted by the American Institute of Physics, opined about why the answer to that titular question is yes: “They have some things that make them very attractive to the military,” said Thomas Karr, chief scientist for sensing and directed energy at MITRE, a nonprofit research company. “They have, in principle, what they call a deep magazine.” In other words, as long as the weapon has power and can avoid overheating, it can fire photons forever.
Directed energy weapons are also precise, Karr continued in the webinar, yielding little collateral damage. That’s definitely truer than kinetic weapons like bullets and bombs. But if civilian infrastructure is close enough to targeted military infrastructure, its proverbial lights can go out, too. Still, it wouldn’t blow up, and the electromagnetic waves would have few collateral effects on humans. “They can be used in all domains: air, land, sea, even outer space, in principle,” he said.
Such weapons could theoretically take down relatively cheap drones and cruise missiles, like those used in the war in Ukraine, without breaking the bank. A directed-energy weapon in the hands of a malicious actor could, say, cut the computers in a civilian office building on purpose, or direct a laser toward a commercial pilot, but those uses violate the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit targeting civilian populations.
In the future, directed energy weapons could theoretically defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles, Karr said, which can travel more than 3,000 miles and are primarily meant to carry nuclear weapons. But those systems, he says, would have to overcome significant technical hurdles, and probably prove themselves on easier targets first. But some have beaming hopes that they could be an important part of Trump’s Golden Dome program, a missile defense scheme meant to take out deadly rockets headed toward the U.S., in part inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome.
The first stages of Golden Dome will likely involve using missiles to attack other missiles. But that’s not necessarily a sustainable solution, since it’s cost- and materials-intensive. In the view of Todd Harrison, a senior fellow with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, putting directed energy weapons in space is a better bet: They would have a wide view and reach, and their photonic bullets would move at the speed of light. “I think all of that points to directed energy as kind of the ideal solution,” he said.
The Department of Defense has labeled directed energy one of 14 “critical technology” areas, and, last year, laid out a roadmap for its development. From 2025 to 2030, that roadmap calls for the military to work on weapons strong enough to neutralize missiles and defend bases and aircraft. Through the end of next year, the document says, the department will decide which weapons, currently in development, might get contracts to become on-ground reality.
Most efforts, though, are still in the research and prototype phase, including the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, or THOR, a microwave weapon built by the New Mexico-based arm of the Air Force Research Lab, which resembles a shipping container with a satellite dish on top.
THOR was a demonstration, and the idea of large-scale directed-energy arsenals isn’t ready for primetime: Scientists don’t yet know how to deliver enough power from far away, from a transportable system, and dissipate the heat the invisible shots would gin up. “All of those things are huge technological challenges that we have not figured out yet,” Harrison said.
Academic researchers like Schamiloglu, though, are working on solving those problems. And according to Harrison and Richardson, the need for that kind of basic research is keeping directed energy funding stable. That’s not true of funding for other fields of science. “You look to where you’re going to get a grant to keep open your laboratory, whether you’re at a university or a company — whatever,” added John Tierney, former congressman and current executive director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “If the military is where the money is, that’s probably where you’re focusing your grant application. And you’re hoping it’s going to have some spinoff great effect for society as a whole, or whatever story you tell yourself, so that you do that.”
But even without a clear future for the technology, he added, “you’ve got to make a living, and you’ve got to keep people working, and you want to see where the science goes, and you’re hoping that there’s some benefit of it.”
That’s advantageous for Albuquerque, arguably the geographic focal point of this research.
“Albuquerque is the nucleus for directed energy in the United States,” declares the city economic development department website, “having more assets that are considered essential to the industry than any other city.”
Driving around Albuquerque, directed energy development lurks behind staid office buildings and military boundaries. The city’s relevant assets form an arc in the southern part of the city.
The University of New Mexico is at the center of that action, and south of the campus is a cluster of importance. Here sits locations of the Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL, and Sandia National Laboratories, both inside the gates of Kirtland Air Force Base, both working toward operational directed energy systems. In 2024, Kirtland and Sandia’s combined expenditures were nearly $13 billion, much of which had an economic impact on the city. Sandia’s total budget request for 2026 is $40 million higher than last year. The Defense Department’s budget is also, if approved as proposed, set to increase by more than $100 billion in 2026.
It’s hard to get a firm number for directed energy efforts, in part because of the enormity and complexity of military budgets, but its “foundational research” funding line is holding steady, with a modest increase between 2025 and 2026. It finds itself under the Directed Energy Center of Excellence Program, with a focus on workforce development and university partners.
That could have a ripple effect on Albuquerque, where a significant fraction of employed people work for government entities.
In the southeastern part of the city, a strip mall containing Mrs. B’s Pawn Shop neighbor Kirtland Air Force Base and an office park that houses government contractor Leidos. From there, it’s a short trek to the companies BAE Systems and SAIC.
Other relevant companies form their own little hub, just northeast of UNM. There’s a big mall, nondescript hotels for visiting businesspeople, and a park-and-ride for Albuquerque’s famous hot-air balloon festival. Nestled among these grounded places are Booz Allen Hamilton and the lesser-known Verus Research — which do directed energy research and development. And all of which, along with UNM, stand to benefit from the government’s investment and interest in directed energy.
Albuquerque is aware of this present and future strength: Directed energy even gets its own section on the economic development website, the kind of digital real estate normally reserved for sectors like agriculture, biomedical services, or retail.
Part of the city’s advantage is that its demographics offer a ready-to-work population, built-in, thanks in part to the heritage of the Manhattan Project, which took place partly in nearby Los Alamos, and its decades-long connection to defense. “I think there is a high level of comfort with training people through jobs that require high levels of security clearances,” said Max Gruner, director of economic development for the city of Albuquerque. Companies know how to sponsor people for those clearances and navigate the rigorous requirements from the outside; the government entities are part of that system; and scientists who have already gotten a clearance know how to keep it. (Don’t spy, break the law, or get into money trouble, for example.)
Those people, with their laser and microwave know-how, can shuffle through the revolving door of Albuquerque’s contractors and government labs.
Because of UNM, new people come into the pipeline and professors and departments, who are in touch with the larger directed-energy ecosystem, are happy to bend their training to fit.
And the environment, minus the relatively high violent crime rate compared to the national average, gives people an extra reason to keep their energetic expertise here. There are 310 days of sunshine, said Gruner, no regular natural disasters, a lower-than-average cost of living, and plenty of public lands for recreation — the Sandia Mountains rise right from the desert floor where scientists and engineers can fire up their powerful technology in the wild.
Some of that expertise and infrastructure seems to have already existed when Schamiloglu took a professorship at The University of New Mexico in the late 1980s. Its burgeoning since has allowed him to bring new people to Albuquerque and into the field.
It’s a story he tells from his sunlight-bright office in early September — the decor of which may make him seem, to an outsider, an unlikely candidate for research that will eventually be used to create weapons. On the door is a definition card printed with the word “liberal,” laid out phonetically. “Proud to be one,” the card reads. Behind his desk is a sizable Georgia O’Keeffe print. Other objects bely his professional interests: a matrix of folders with labels like ion diode and space plasma, along with a book titled “Quantum Computing for Everyone.”
Schamiloglu, who was born in the Bronx to parents who emigrated from the Soviet Union, didn’t start out in directed energy. He spent his Ph.D. studying nuclear fusion, but when he came to UNM, he slanted his line of work. He was broadly interested in generating electromagnetic energy. So, he said, “I decided to start a program in high-power microwaves.”
Part of the city’s advantage is that its demographics offer a ready-to-work population, built-in, thanks in part to the heritage of the Manhattan Project, which took place partly in nearby Los Alamos, and its decades-long connection to defense.
In fusion, he’d used high voltages to produce a beam of protons; making microwaves required him to generate, instead, electrons. No problem, he thought: Protons are simply positive particles, while electrons are simply negative ones. He just had to reverse the polarity.
High-power, focused microwaves can kill electronics by overheating or corrupting them, surge power in a system until its supply malfunctions, incapacitate the guidance systems of drones or missiles, and heat fuel until it explodes. Used against humans, the weapons can cause tissue damage and pain; the U.S. has investigated their application to things like crowd control.
But when Schamiloglu started, he wasn’t particularly thinking about applications of those electrons and the consequent microwaves, nor was he thinking of the motivations of those who would become his funders, just a short drive away in Albuquerque. “Honestly, I was an assistant professor, and I know the game: You have to bring money, you have to hire students, you have to do the research, publish the papers,” he said. “That’s what was driving me.”
The power of New Mexico itself was also propelling him forward: Los Alamos, about 100 miles north, gave him two capacitors, devices that store electrical energy, and a switch. And Sandia National Laboratories, nearby, gave the then-young researcher a machine that could slowly store up low-power electrical energy and then release it in very short bursts.
Soon after his arrival on campus, Schamiloglu built other components to make the machine produce high-power microwaves. He knew the Air Force Research Lab, just a few miles away on Kirtland Air Force Base, would be interested. Schamiloglu schlepped to the head of the high-power microwave division, showed him this work, and told the Air Force it would be useful to them to have a related academic program based in Albuquerque.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research gave him $100,000 to start such a program, which he did around 1989.
It was obvious to Schamiloglu that the main application of this work — the reason the Air Force was interested — was that energy from microwaves can harm electronics. “I understood that, but I never played on that side of the problem,” he said. He was instead interested in the physics and engineering behind the devices that generated the microwaves. “How do you make them better? How do you improve their efficiency?”
Those are the questions his research continued to pursue, with the answers nevertheless feeding that mysterious other side of the problem.
His research program, and so microwave research at UNM, arguably got on the map when a vice president from what is now known as the Russian Academy of Sciences came to visit in 1991, and offered to sell UNM the Sinus-6. Tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were cooling down, and the Air Force Research Lab agreed to buy the device to the tune of about $350,000.
“In October of 1991, I flew to Moscow,” Schamiloglu said. His hosts took Schamiloglu to the region of the country his own family was originally from, and finally onto Tomsk, where the Sinus-6 lived. After feasts of berries, meats, caviar, and double-digit shots of vodka, Schamiloglu came home with the machine.
“That made my career,” he said.
It also, perhaps, helped make Albuquerque not just a place where government labs and contractors work on directed energy, but one where students and professors do the related basic research that informs those labs’ and companies’ efforts — and supplies their future workforce.
Microwaves are just part of the directed-energy equation: Equally important are lasers. But for a long time, many of Schamiloglu’s colleagues at UNM — laser experts who worked in the physics and astronomy departments — weren’t interested. “A lot of the faculty in physics didn’t want to have anything to do with DOD,” he said.
But decades after Schamiloglu started down this path, around 2019, Arash Mafi, then the director of UNM’s Center for High Technology Materials, became keen on the idea. “The next step is, how do we kickstart this?” Schamiloglu said.
They proposed a new Directed Energy Center, applied for federal money, and partnered with the Air Force Research Lab, receiving $7.5 million total between 2021 and 2023. The university is currently negotiating a new cooperative agreement with AFRL, one that lasts longer and allows funds from diverse sources. The recently ended government shutdown has made things uncertain.
“If the military is where the money is, that’s probably where you’re focusing your grant application. And you’re hoping it’s going to have some spinoff great effect for society as a whole, or whatever story you tell yourself, so that you do that.”
Recently, Schamiloglu also applied to the Directed Energy Workforce Development Research Project, an initiative sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Joint Directed Energy Transition Office. It would fund students to do basic research in lasers and microwaves, with the aim of amping up future experts.
In Albuquerque, that workforce has immediate options. Ganesh Balakrishnan, a professor with UNM’s electrical and computer engineering department, said the Directed Energy Center collaborates with Sandia and with the Air Force. “We share labs,” he said. “There’s students going back and forth.”
Balakrishnan’s building, which he showed off with Schamiloglu in September, is filled with the machinery that begets and tests lasers and their components. There are clean rooms — controlled spaces designed to keep out pollutants in the air — and regular rooms with instruments where scientists and engineers produce components for new laser technology. They look like extra-fancy brewery equipment, and lab workers have made them their own, with jokey décor, like the sombrero and googly eyes peering down from one.
There aren’t many other U.S. universities that specialize in this kind of directed-energy science. Doing laser development, Balakrishnan says, requires broad knowledge, not necessarily the narrow lens of traditional academic funding. “So if you don’t have these types of centers, it’s hard to make any meaningful progress,” he said.
While UNM arguably sits at the geographic hotspot of this research, other universities have recently started similar programs. The University of Central Florida jumped first, in 2020, with its own Center for Directed Energy, doing research in both lasers and microwaves just as UNM does. There’s an old laser facility nearby, which UCF currently manages and uses to do its energetic experiments. The University of Arizona christened its Center for Directed Energy in 2024; Penn State launched the Center of Excellence in Directed Energy in spring 2025.
But, Schamiloglu argues, UNM’s position in Albuquerque gives students off-campus access they wouldn’t have anywhere else. “This is the epicenter in the nation for this type of high energy density technologies,” he said. “So, for sure, we’re in a unique, unique ecosystem here.”
They’re able to connect to what the nearby federal facilities actually want, since they’re next door. “It’s very much a need-driven innovation that happens,” Balakrishnan said.
And that’s why, perhaps, AFRL sometimes recruits students before they even graduate. “There are students who we train in the clean room for a couple of months, and they’re gone,” he added.
Christopher Wilcox works in the aero-optical effects laboratory at AFRL, where some of the lab’s directed energy work takes place.
Visual: AFRL/SPIE
Christopher Wilcox, a senior engineer at AFRL who manages the university directed energy program, said it helps students find out what’s going on behind those Kirtland gates. “We need them to take these classes and get educated and bring back skills,” Wilcox said. “And it’s just great. It’s working out.”
The lab is working to unite UNM with other schools in the state, to form a directed energy consortium of sorts, he said.
Back down in Schamiloglu’s lab, Rodriguez said his work has given him a leg up in the job market. “A lot of people just graduate and then they go into a job with no experience,” he said. They might be nervous to work with these high voltages. Rodriguez, though, is not afraid, and he hopes to find a job at a lab like Sandia. “I heard they have really nice facilities — nice salary and stuff like that,” he said.
It’s a hopeful feeling for a young scientist: going into a field where things are blooming instead of withering. Especially in a city that, within its boundaries, provides options.
Schamiloglu says there’s been a slight shift in what the DOD is interested in recently: They’re asking microwave researchers like him to focus on slightly higher-frequency waves.
He’s happy to oblige. It’s a new, and fun, scientific problem. What the DOD does with his solutions, he can’t say. It’s classified, and it’s not really his purview.
“Scientists always need money to do research they want to do anyway,” said Rebecca Slayton, an associate professor of science and technology studies at Cornell University.
Slayton has researched how scientists and the public thought about the previous generation’s big missile defense program, the Strategic Defense Initiative. Casually called Star Wars, the Reagan-era program poured billions into directed-energy defenses — ones that, back in the ’80s, critics didn’t believe were feasible. Still, some who wondered if the program could deliver took the money and ran with it anyway, because it was financially fertile ground from which they could pursue their work. That sometimes happened, Slayton said, in concert with a wink. “I’ll accept money here, and there’s nothing unethical about that, because I’m doing interesting research, and I’m not actually suggesting that we can get to where Ronald Reagan wants to go,” said Slayton.
But, in Star Wars, investments in a missile-defense road-to-nowhere also drew smart scientists away from other areas of research. Today, when those other areas of research are drying up, the same could again be true.
Looking at where the money is, and where it isn’t, young scientists from other disciplines are contemplating how their knowledge might apply sideways. Advanced optics, for instance, has applications beyond directed energy, in medical imaging and astronomy.
A version of that realization happened to Sidebottom, who came from the physics department because he wasn’t finding research work there. Someone suggested he talk to Schamiloglu, who tasked him right away.
Magnetized toward these machines, Sidebottom has become more interested in this applied field — the physical reality of it, in contrast to the theoretical chalkboards of pure research physics. That’s why he looks forward to the underground tests they do — going into the safe room and hearing the machines, dangerous if not for their shield, pop off.
In that shielded space, the sound is muted, but the effects echo into Albuquerque and, maybe someday soon, into future conflicts of the wider world.
UPDATE: A previous version of this piece stated that the University of New Mexico is west of downtown Albuquerque. It’s east.