Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Thu
Feb 10, 2005
6:30 PM
 

Verizon Laboratories
 

Laser Beam Combining

Dr. Tso Y. Fan, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA

Abstract:  Beam combining arrays of lasers has been viewed as an attractive approach to increasing the power and brightness of lasers.  The challenge is to provide an output that propagates like a single laser beam, as opposed to an array of laser beams.  However, until recently, little success had been demonstrated in performing beam combining on large laser arrays with nearly ideal outputs, even after decades of effort.  Substantial success has been demonstrated recently in combining diode and fiber laser arrays with nearly ideal beam quality using wavelength techniques invented at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.  For example, a 100-element diode laser array has been beam combined with 35-W quasi-cw output power in a near diffraction limited beam.

This talk will present an overview of beam combining techniques (coherent and wavelength) and discuss some of the relative merits of these approaches.   Experiments on beam combining of fiber and diode laser arrays using these techniques will be presented.

Note: This work was sponsored by the Department of the Air Force under Air Force contract F19628-00-C-0002. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government.

Biography:  T. Y. Fan is the Assistant Leader of the Quantum Electronics Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.  He received S. B. degrees from MIT in both electrical engineering and materials science and engineering and the M. S. and Ph. D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA.  He has contributed broadly in solid-state laser and nonlinear optics technology.  He is widely recognized for his work in diode-pumped solid-state lasers, in the development of Yb:YAG lasers, and for advances in laser beam combining.  Dr. Fan is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and a Senior Member of the IEEE.  He served as an Elected Member of the IEEE/LEOS Board of Governors from 1994-1996 and was the Topical Editor, Lasers for Optics Letters from 1994-1999.  He also has served as Chair of the LEOS Annual Meeting and the OSA Topical Meeting on Advanced Solid-State Lasers.

Location:  Verizon Laboratories