High-power and high-quality pulsed fiber lasers with low repetition frequency are widely applied to various fields ranging from basic science to industrial applications. Coherent beam combining (CBC) is a significant method to obtain that beam, but few methods used for large-scale CBC of pulsed fiber lasers with low repetition frequency were presented. To realize it, a new method based on a continuous carrier was designed, where the continuous wave worked as the beacon signal, and the stochastic parallel gradient descent algorithm was employed for phase locking and tilt correction. The beam combining experiment revealed that the combining efficiency of two lasers with a repetition frequency of 15 kHz and a pulse width of 100 ns was 95%, and the fringe contrast in the center of the far-field spot was improved about three times. This method promises to be furtherly applied to combine the pulsed lasers with lower repetition frequency and narrower pulse width. These results pave the way for large-scale CBC of high-power and high-quality pulsed fiber lasers.
Recently developed adaptive fiber laser array technique provides a promising way incorporating aberrations correction with laser beams transmission. Existing researches are focused on sub-aperture low order aberrations (pistons and tips/tilts) compensation and got excellent correction results for weak and moderate turbulence in short range. While such results are not adequate for future laser applications which face longer range and stronger turbulence. So sub-aperture high aberrations compensation is necessary. Relationship between corrigible orders of sub-aperture aberrations and far-field metrics as power-in-the-bucket (PIB) and Strehl ratio is investigated with numeric simulation in this paper. Numerical investigation results shows that increment in array number won’t result in effective improvement of the far-field metric if sub-aperture size is fixed. Low order aberrations compensation in sub-apertures gets its best performances only when turbulence strength is weak. Pistons compensation becomes invalid and higher order aberrations compensation is necessary when turbulence gets strong enough. Cost functions of the adaptive fiber laser array with high order aberrations correction in sub-apertures are defined and the optimum corrigible orders are discussed. Results shows that high order (less than first ten Zernike orders) compensation is acceptable where balance between increment of the far-field metric and the cost and complexity of the system could be reached.
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