Coherent beam combination of two thulium-doped fiber laser beams with the multi-ditheringtechnique

Abstract

Coherent beam combination of two thulium-doped fiber laser beams using a multi-dithering technique is presented for the first time. In the experiment, two fiber lasers centered at 1948.6 nm are coherently combined, and a phase modulator based on piezoelectric ceramics transducer is connected in one beam path to compensate for the phase errors between the two beams. When the phase control system is closed loop, the fringe contrast of the far-field intensity pattern is improved to be more than 75%, from 15% in open-loop, and the residual phase error is less than λ/20. The experimental results show that the performance of the phase control system is robust and the control bandwidth is more than 1 kHz, which indicates that the above approach can be scaled to facilitate the coherent beam combination of kilo-watt level thulium-doped fiberlaser.