A New View on Acousto-optic Laser Beam Combining

Abstract

Coherent combining is a well-known principle of up-scaling the peak power in different types of pulsed lasers. A new type of acousto-optic beam combiner for pulsed lasers i s proposed and discussed. We demonstrate that phase delay between two laser beams can be controlled and the beams can be combined using one acoustooptic device. Two cases of degenerate and non-degenerate Br gg diffraction are analyzed and compared. The experiment with anisotropic Bragg diffraction in paratell urite demonstrated efficiency of combining exceeding 95 %.