Synchronization and Coherent Combining of Two Pulsed Fiber Ring Lasers Based on Direct Phase Modulation

We demonstrate a scalable architecture for coherent combining of pulsed fiber ring lasers based on mutual injection and direct phase modulation. By direct phase modulation in the common arm of two ring lasers, synchronous pulsed lasers can be generated and coherent combining of the two synchronous lasers is obtained. Two pulsed fiber ring lasers are coherently combined with 0.55μJ pulse energy and 10μs pulse duration at a repetition rate of 27.5kHz. Experimental results show that the two fiber ring lasers are phase locked with an invariable phase difference of π and have good temporal synchronization and spatial coherence. The combining efficiency of the two pulsed fiber laser reaches 90% and the fringe contrast is larger than 40%. Neither active phase control nor polarization control is used in our experiment and this method can be extended to combine more beams and higher repetition rate scaling up to higher power.