Coherent combination of high-power, zigzag slab lasers

TLDR

The study demonstrates a scalable architecture for a high‑power, high‑brightness solid‑state laser using coherent combinations of master oscillator power amplifier chains. The design employs a common master oscillator feeding a sequence of multikilowatt Nd:YAG zigzag slab amplifiers, with adaptive optics correcting each beamlet’s wavefront, and the beamlets are tiled and phase‑locked to produce a single output beam. The laser achieves 19 kW output with beam quality better than twice the diffraction limit, making it the brightest continuous‑wave solid‑state laser reported.

Abstract

We demonstrate a scalable architecture for a high-power, high-brightness, solid-state laser based on coherent combinations of master oscillator power amplifier chains. A common master oscillator injects a sequence of multikilowatt Nd:YAG zigzag slab amplifiers. Adaptive optics correct the wavefront of each amplified beamlet. The beamlets are tiled side by side and actively phase locked to form a single output beam. The laser produces 19 kW with beam quality <2x diffraction limited. To the best of our knowledge, this is the brightest cw solid-state laser demonstrated to date.