Wavefront aberration mitigation with adaptive distributed aperture fiber array lasers

Abstract

In this letter, a two-stage phase control technique is proposed to increase the control bandwidth of the target-in-the-loop (TIL) system. In this technique, the first stage phase control is enabled by LiNbO3 phase modulator to compensate the phase noises in the fiber amplifiers, and the second stage phase control is enabled by the liquid crystal (LC) to compensate the phase noises induced by the atmospheric turbulence. We built a TIL coherent beam combining system with 3-channel coherent fiber lasers over a 40 m atmospheric propagation path. In our experiment, the stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm was employed for phase control. When the phase control system was in the close loop, the performance of laser beam projection was significantly improved, and the phase locking bandwidth for transmitter side phase distortions reached 1 kHz. This method can be used for applications such as energy transmission and free-space optical communication.