The XCAN project aims at the coherent combination of 61 fiber amplifiers in the femtosecond regime. An important intermediate step towards this goal is the implementation of a seven fiber test setup, which allows to address key scientific and technical challenges which might occur in the scaled version of 61 fibers. This work includes the design and characterization of a support unit able to hold 61 fibers with the high precision required for an efficient coherent combination in tiled aperture configuration. This configuration, in combination with an interferometric phase measurement and active phase control, is particularly well suited for the coherent combination of a very large number of beams. Our first preliminary results with seven fibers include a combination efficiency of 30 % and a residual phase error between two fibers as low as λ/40 rms. Experiments conducted with three fibers in order to evaluate technical improvements revealed an increase of efficiency to 54 %. The combined beam was temporally compressed to 225 fs, which is Fourier transform limited with respect to the measured spectrum.
The XCAN project, which is a three years project and began in 2015, carried out by Thales and the Ecole Polytechnique aims at developing a laser system based on the coherent combination of laser beams produced through a network of amplifying optical fibers. This technique provides an attractive mean of reaching simultaneously the high peak and high average powers required for various industrial, scientific and defense applications. The architecture has to be compatible with very large number of fibers (1000-10000). The goal of XCAN is to overcome all the key scientific and technological barriers to the design and development of an experimental laser demonstrator. The coherent addition of multiple individual phased beams is aimed to provide tens of Gigawatt peak power at 50 kHz repetition rate.
Coherent beam combining (CBC) of fiber amplifiers involves a master oscillator which is split into N fiber channels and then amplified through series of polarization maintaining fiber pre-amplifiers and amplifiers. In the so-called tiled aperture configuration, the N fibers are arranged in an array and collimated in the near field of the laser output. The N beamlets then interfere constructively in the far field, and give a bright central lobe. CBC techniques with active phase locking involve phase mismatch detection, calculation of the correction and phase compensation of each amplifier by means of phase modulators. Interferometric phase measurement has proven to be particularly well suited to phase-lock a very large number of fibers in continuous regime. A small fraction of the N beamlets is imaged onto a camera. The beamlets interfere separately with a reference beam. The phase mismatch of each beam is then calculated from the interferences’ position. In this presentation, we demonstrate the phase locking of 19 fibers in femtosecond pulse regime with this technique.
In our first experiment, a master oscillator generates pulses of 300 fs (chirped at 200 ps). The beam is split into 19 passive channels. Prior to phase locking, the optical path differences are adjusted down to 10 μm with optical delay lines. Interferograms of the 19 fibers are recorded at 1 kHz with a camera. A dedicated algorithm is developed to measure both the phase and the delay between the fibers on a measurement path. The delay and phase shift are thus calculated collectively from a single image and piezo-electric fiber stretchers are controlled in order to ensure compensation of time-varying phase and delay variations. The residual phase shift error is below λ/60 rms. The coherent beam combining is obtained after propagation and compression. The combined pulse width is measured at 315fs. A second experiment was done to coherently combine two amplified channels of the XCAN demonstrator. A residual phase shift error of λ/30 rms was measured in this case.
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