Coherent addition of adjacent lasers by forked eigenstate operation.
Forked laser eigenstates are shown to provide a powerful tool both to phase lock spatially separated laser oscillators and to add their powers coherently into a TEM(00) output beam. Coherent addition of the powers extracted from two fiber-coupled diode-pumped Nd:YAG channels is theoretically and experimentally demonstrated. Pure TEM(00) oscillation is obtained with a 20% optical-to-optical conversion efficiency. The coherence of the two-propagation-axis laser is proved, and single-frequency operation is demonstrated. The scalability of the scheme is discussed.
Brunel
M
M
Le Floch
A
A
Bretenaker
F
F
Marty
J
J
Molva
E
E