All-Fiber Coherent Arrays Combining High Power Lasers

We experimentally studied the coherent beam combining characteristics of fiber laser arrays in all-fiber passive configurations using polarization maintaining fibers. In addition, we simulated the coherent performance by including fiber nonlinearity. The beam combining performance is affected by both optical feedback and the laser cavity length difference. In addition, Kramers-Kronig and n(2) induced nonlinearity plays an important role for the coherent phase locking. We describe the scalability of the coherent array to high power via scaling of laser power and fiber count. We show coherently combined output powers of 27.4 Watts and 12.2 Watts at 1083 nm in 2-laser and 4-laser arrays.