Coherent combining of a 4 kW, eight-element fiber amplifier array
July 15, 2011
Journal Article
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Opt. Lett., vol. 36, No. 14, 15 July 2011, pp. 2686-2688.
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Summary
Commercial 0:5kW Yb-doped fiber amplifiers have been characterized and found to be suitable for coherent beam combining. Eight such fiber amplifiers have been coherently combined in a tiled-aperture configuration with 78% combining efficiency and total output power of 4kW. The power-in-the-bucket vertical beam quality of the combined output is 1.25 times diffraction limited at full power. The beam-combining performance is independent of output power.