Spectral Beam Combining of Fiber Lasers by Using Reflecting Volume Bragg Gratings

By employing three reflecting volume Bragg gratings, a near-infrared 4-channel spectral-beam-combining system is demonstrated to present 720 W combined power with a combining efficiency of 94.7%. The combined laser beam is near-diffraction-limited with a beam factor M^2-1.54. During this 4-channel beam-combining process, no special active cooling measures are used to evaluate the volume Bragg gratings as combining elements are under the higher power laser operation. Thermal expansion and period distortion are verified in a 2 k W 2-channel beam-combining process, and the heat issue in the transmission case is found to be more remarkable than that in the diffraction e-se. Transmitted and diffracted beams experience wave-front aberrations with different degrees, thus leading to distinct beam deterioration.

High efficiency of spectral beam combining by using large optical cavity lasers

We studied the spectral beam combining[SBC]of a large optical cavity[LOC]laser array to achieve high-power and highbrightness laser output.We discussed the characteristics of the external cavity feedback efficiency and the focal length of the transform lens for lasers with different waveguide thicknesses.We have found that using LOC laser diodes can increase the proportion of external cavity feedback,thereby improving the SBC efficiency.At a current of 90 A,the CW output power of the SBC system is 59.2 W,and the SBC efficiency reaches up to 102.8%.All emitters of the laser array have achieved spectral locking with a spectral width of 11.67 nm,and the beam parameter product is 4.38 mm·mrad.

Narrow-spectral-span spectral beam combining with a nonparallel double-grating structure

We propose a nonparallel double-grating structure in a spectral-beam combining technique, where two gratings are placed nonparallel satisfying the Littrow mount in the focal region of the convergent lens. The most attractive advantage of this approach is that it will compress the spectral span into half of its original spectrum, which means the number of combined elements can be doubled in the gain range of diode lasers. Experimental results demonstrate that the CW output power of the combined beam is 30.9 W with a spectral span of 7.0 nm, compared with its original spectrum span of 13.6 nm, and the spectral beam combining efficiency is 70.5%. In consideration that a single grating could have a high efficiency of 〉97% in a bandwidth of over ten nanometers, the efficiency loss of the grating pair should be less than 6%, which is acceptable for most applications, so this method of using double gratings should be highly interesting for practical applications when a nearly doubled number of diode lasers could be combined into one single laser compared with the previous single-grating methods.