External cavity beam combining of 21 semiconductor lasers using SPGD

Active coherent beam combining of laser oscillators is an attractive way to achieve high output power in a diffraction limited beam. Here we describe an active beam combining system used to coherently combine 21 semiconductor laser elements with an 81% beam combining efficiency in an external cavity...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied optics. Optical technology and biomedical optics Vol. 51; no. 11; p. 1724
Main Authors: Montoya, Juan, Augst, Steven J, Creedon, Kevin, Kansky, Jan, Fan, Tso Yee, Sanchez-Rubio, Antonio
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States 10.04.2012
ISSN:1559-128X, 2155-3165, 1539-4522
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Summary:Active coherent beam combining of laser oscillators is an attractive way to achieve high output power in a diffraction limited beam. Here we describe an active beam combining system used to coherently combine 21 semiconductor laser elements with an 81% beam combining efficiency in an external cavity configuration compared with an upper limit of 90% efficiency in the particular configuration of the experiment. Our beam combining system utilizes a stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm for active phase control. This work demonstrates that active beam combining is not subject to the scaling limits imposed on passive-phasing systems.
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ISSN:1559-128X
2155-3165
1539-4522
DOI:10.1364/AO.51.001724