Passive Phase Locking of Three Nanosecond Fiber Amplifiers Using a Dammann Grating Spatial Filter

A passive coherent beam combination of three nanosecond Yb-doped fiber amplifiers by an all-optical feedback loop is realized by a Dammann grating intracavity spatial filter. By using this diffractive-optics-based spatial filtering technique, three tile-aperture laser beams are phase-locked with a peak power of 1.02 kW. The width of the combined pulses is 9.6 ns, and the repetition frequency is 2.208 MHz. The visibility of the far-field interference pattern is up to 82.9%. The results show that this approach can scale to larger arrays and higher powers.