Abstract

Recently, there has been great interest in the aperture filling of phase-locked laser arrays. The amplitude distribution of these arrays usually gives rise to undesired sidelobes in the far field. It is necessary to concentrate all the energy in the central lobe for many applications. Therefore, various techniques have been proposed, such as by using a phase corrector directly on the laser facet, via a imaging lens, or a Fourier system with a phase corrector. We have made an experiment in which a 1-D phased array can be aperture filled by introducing a phase compensator in the fractional self-imaging planes of the array.^1-2

© 1990 Optical Society of America