Coherent combining of a fiber laser array via cascaded internal phase control technique

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrated a cascaded internal phase control technique. A laser array with 12 channels was divided into three sub-arrays and a stage array, and phases of the sub-arrays and the stage array were locked by four phase controllers based on the stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm, respectively. In this way, the phases of the whole array were locked, and the visibility of the interference pattern of the whole emitted laser array in the far field was ∼ 93%. In addition, the technique has the advantage of element expanding and can be further used in the high-power coherent beam combination (CBC) system due to its compact spatial structure