title: Experimental Demonstration of a Highly Efficient Fan-out Polarization Grating.
abstract: Highly efficient fan-out elements are crucial in coherent beam combining architectures especially in coupled laser resonators where the beam passes through the fan-out element twice per round trip. Although the theoretical efficiency is usually less than 86%, the Dammann gratings are ubiquitously utilized in a variety of types of coherent beam combining systems due to the facile design and fabrication. In the current paper, we experimentally demonstrate a highly efficient fan-out polarization grating. It is the first time to our knowledge that all the three space-variant parameters of a polarization grating are simultaneously optimized to achieve the function of multi-beam splitting. Besides the high fan-out efficiency, the ability to control the polarization states of individual split beams is another advantage of this polarization grating. The novel polarization grating is promising to find applications in laser beam combining systems.
authors.affiliation: School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, China.|Department of Electro-Optics and Photonics, University of Dayton, 300 College Park, Dayton, Ohio 45469, USA.
authors.forename: Chenhao
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wan
authors.affiliation: Department of Electro-Optics and Photonics, University of Dayton, 300 College Park, Dayton, Ohio 45469, USA.|School of Electronic Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 611731, China.
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, China.
authors.forename: Xiahui
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.affiliation: Department of Electro-Optics and Photonics, University of Dayton, 300 College Park, Dayton, Ohio 45469, USA.
authors.forename: Qiwen
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhan