Patent ID: 7336363
Filing Date: 2008-02-26
Classification: B23K,H01S

Abstract:
1. A method for combining beams from multiple laser emitters, the method comprising: generating beams from N emitters via a master oscillator coupled to a binary tree of multiple emitter stages of beams splitters and emitters; interferometrically combining the beams to produce a composite output beam, wherein the combining step comprises providing a binary tree of beam-combining splitters in which outputs from the multiple emitter stages are combined, wherein each stage of the beam-combining splitters produces one or more combined output beams and one or more spurious output beams; and anti-symmetrically phase modulating pairs of emitters at each emitter stage to control an optical phase of the multiple emitters to produce nulls at corresponding spurious outputs of the binary tree of beam-combining splitters, whereby nulling all of the spurious outputs results in maximizing the power delivered to the composite output beam, such that mutual phase coherence of the beams is optimized and power lost is minimized as a result of combining beams that are not perfectly in phase; wherein the composite output beam has better beam characteristics than one produced by an equivalently powered side-by-side array of emitters.