One of the hottest areas in lasers now is the use of incoherent beam combining to create very high-power laser diode systems. Such systems are used directly for applications such as laser machining and welding, or for pumping of large solid-state lasers. They're also used as input to fiber-delivered, "direct-diode" high-power light sources. But laser diodes have larger spectral linewidths than most nondiode lasers (high-power laser diodes also have a large multimode emission area, further complicating beam combination). As a result, brightnesses achieved by incoherent beam combining via wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) reach an unsatisfyingly low limit. This is a soft limit, however, in that novel beam-combination designs are continually being created that go further in getting just that little bit extra.
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