Coherent combination of high-power, zigzag slab lasers.
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.
Goodno
G D
GD
Northrop Grumman Space Technology, California 90278, USA. gregory.goodno@ngc.com
Komine
H
H
McNaught
S J
SJ
Weiss
S B
SB
Redmond
S
S
Long
W
W
Simpson
R
R
Cheung
E C
EC
Howland
D
D
Epp
P
P
Weber
M
M
McClellan
M
M
Sollee
J
J
Injeyan
H
H