LASER BEAM COMBINING: Coherent beam combiner yields 100 W of fiber-laser power

摘要

Over the last decade, high-power fiber lasers have gained substantial market share in industrial applications such as marking, metal cutting, and welding due to their excellent output-beam quality and high wall-plug efficiency. Sustaining this growth to become the dominant high-power source type for materials processing depends on advances in beam-combining techniques. Under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base (Albuquerque, NM), Vytran (Morganville, NJ) scientists and collaborators from AFRL and Hughes Research Laboratories (Malibu, CA) recently demonstrated all-fiber and all-passive coherent beam combining (CBC) of two, three, and four high-power fiber lasers to produce more than 100 W of single-transverse-mode output at around 1 (mu)m. To Vytran's knowledge, this is the highest power output to date from an all-fiber, laser-based CBC without any active control.