Patent ID: 8107167

Claim:
An apparatus for forming a spatially non-dispersive beam, the apparatus comprising: a plurality of pulsed laser sources, each laser source is to produce a pulsed laser beam at a different wavelength where each pulsed laser beam has a peak power of above 0.5 kW, and where each pulsed laser beam is spatially dispersed from the other pulsed laser beams; and a beam combiner apparatus having a plurality of spatial dispersion-correcting stages one for each of the pulsed laser beams, where each spatial dispersion-correcting stage is tuned to transmit and reflect incident light using a different spatial-domain transmission profile from the other spatial dispersion-correcting stages, where the spatial dispersion-correcting stages are configured to combine the pulsed laser beams along a propagation path in a wavelength-independent manner by removing the spatial dispersion from the pulsed laser beams and in a temporally synchronized manner to produce the spatial non-dispersive beam as a combined pulsed output beam from the beam combiner apparatus, the spatial non-dispersive beam having a spectral profile that spans the different wavelengths of the pulsed laser beams and having a peak power that is proportional to a combined peak power of the pulsed laser beams.