title: Coherent femtosecond pulse combining of multiple parallel chirped pulse fiber amplifiers.
abstract: We report on femtosecond pulse combining with up to four parallel chirped-pulse fiber amplifier channels. Active phase locking is implemented using the LOCSET (Locking of Optical Coherence by Single-detector Electronic-frequency Tagging) single detector feedback technique, resulting in 96.4%, 94.0%, and 93.9% relative combining efficiency with two, three, and four channels respectively. Theoretical and experimental analysis of combining efficiency dependence on amplitude and phase noise shows convergence to a fixed value with increasing number of channels, indicating that multi-channel pulse combining with LOCSET feedback should be scalable to very large numbers of channels.
authors.affiliation: Center for Ultrafast Optical Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA. lsiiman@eecs.umich.edu
authors.forename: Leo A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Siiman
authors.forename: Wei-zung
authors.initials: WZ
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.forename: Tong
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Almantas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Galvanauskas