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