Coherent beam combination of two-dimensional high power fiber amplifier array using stochastic parallel gradient descent algorithm

Abstract

We demonstrate coherent beam combination of two-dimensional high power fiber amplifier array using stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm. Four polarization-maintained fiber amplifiers are tiled side by side into a 2×2 laser array with a fill factor of 54% in the near-field. Phase control on the fiber amplifiers are performed by running SPGD algorithm on a digital dignal processor with updating rate of 50 000 Hz/channel. Coherent beam combination of the four fiber amplifiers with a total output power of 60.1 W using SPGD algorithm is demonstrated. Beam quality of the combined beam is computed to be BQ<1.4.