Passive coherent combining of lasers with phase-contrast filtering for enhanced efficiency

摘要

A new passive technique to phase-lock a laser array is proposed and analyzed. It improves the laser combining efficiency with a large number of emitters. Our architecture combines selective coupling based on a phase-contrast filter and resonant phase nonlinearity of amplifiers. A numerical study predicts that with 20 fiber lasers the architecture leads to a phase-locking efficiency which is twice the value observed up to now in published experiments.