Abstract

The development of high average power lasers is an area of major research and commercial effort. Moving to high average powers has been thwarted by thermal induced refractive index changes which limit the maximum attainable power at high beam quality. Coherent beam combination (CBC) has been an area of significant research effort as it offers the ability to run multiple low power, high quality, lasers which are then combined to produce one high quality, high brightness source [1]. We demonstrate for the first time a novel system which employs both phase conjugation and self-organisation in order to coherently combine two self starting adaptive laser oscillators with high combination efficiencies. The advantage is that combination is performed passively without the requirement for active adjustment of phase shifting elements with computer control algorithms.

© 2009 IEEE