Interferometric phase measurement techniques for coherent beam combining

Abstract

Coherent beam combining of fiber amplifiers provides an attractive mean of reaching high power laser. In an interferometric phase measurement the beams issued for each fiber combined are imaged onto a sensor and interfere with a reference plane wave. This registration of interference patterns on a camera allows the measurement of the exact phase error of each fiber beam in a single shot. Therefore, this method is a promising candidate toward very large number of combined fibers. Based on this technique, several architectures can be proposed to coherently combine a high number of fibers. The first one based on digital holography transfers directly the image of the camera to spatial light modulator (SLM). The generated hologram is used to compensate the phase errors induced by the amplifiers. This architecture has therefore a collective phase measurement and correction. Unlike previous digital holography technique, the probe beams measuring the phase errors between the fibers are co-propagating with the phase-locked signal beams. This architecture is compatible with the use of multi-stage isolated amplifying fibers. In that case, only 20 pixels per fiber on the SLM are needed to obtain a residual phase shift error below λ/10rms. The second proposed architecture calculates the correction applied to each fiber channel by tracking the relative position of the interference finges. In this case, a phase modulator is placed on each channel. In that configuration, only 8 pixels per fiber on the camera is required for a stable close loop operation with a residual phase error of λ/20rms, which demonstrates the scalability of this concept.