Beam quality in spectral beam combination based on multi-layer dielectric grating

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Owing to damage, thermal issues, and nonlinear optical effects, the output power of fiber laser has been proven to be limited. Beam combining techniques are the attractive solutions in order to achieve high-power high-brightness fiber laser output. Designing such a high-power laser system relies on coherent and incoherent combination of radiation from multiple laser channels into a single beam with enhanced brightness. Spectral beam combination is a promising alternative way that allows each array to be overlapped in near-and far-field without spatial interference, thus relaxing the requirements for linewidth controlling and phase locking of individual array and practically allowing power and brightness to be scaled with the potential to combine a large number of channels. Spectral beam combination implementations can be divided into two subsets: serial and parallel, based on the combining elements. For scaling high power, we pursue spectral beam combining with parallel subsets as an alternative to other beam combination implementation. In the spectral beam combining system based on multi-layer dielectric grating, the combined beam suffers the degradation in beam quality, which is caused by the optical dispersion, and also by the random error due to the misalignment of arrays or the thermal-optic effect of grating in the experimental system. In this paper, we strictly derive the equation of M2 variation caused by the optical dispersion in both single-grating structure and dual-grating structure. And also, we discuss how the laser linewidth, beam size, spectral separation of two adjacent channels, distance between two adjacent channels and the period of grating influence the desired beam quality in detail, separately, in the single-grating structure and the dual-grating structure. The results show that with the value of M2 fixed, the finite beam size gives rise to a laser bandwidth decreasing in single-grating structure combination, whereas the beam size induces a laser bandwidth to increase in dual-grating structure combination. If M2 1.2, the laser bandwidth of dual-grating system can be over several sub-nanometers, rather than several tens of pm as in the single grating design.