Abstract
For many applications like solid-state laser pumping and telecommunications it is of great interest to have high-power beams from diode lasers with a good beam quality. In addition to the direct improvement of the monomode diode lasers, laser beams can be further amplified by semiconductor laser amplifiers (SLAs). There are two problems in such a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) system. First, due to the imperfect antireflexion coating and other phase distortions in the amplifier, the amplified beam often has an unsatisfactory beam quality compared with the incident one. The second problem is that, due to the high gain of the diode laser medium, it is impossible to get higher power by passing the beam through several amplifiers in series. Recently, SDL Inc. integrated several amplifiers in a parallel way to get a diode MOPA-array with a coherent laser output.1 In this presentation we propose and demonstrate a diode laser MOPA system using photorefractive multibeam coupling to combine amplifiers in phase.
© 1996 Optical Society of America
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