Coherent Beam Combination Using a General Model-Based Method

Coherent beam combination techniques can increase the output laser power from a single gain medium. We demonstrate coherent beam combination using the general model-based wavefront error correction method. The experiments for wavefront error correction are performed by using a 7-segment deformable mirror. Both the general model-based method and the stochastic parallel gradient descent algorithm are used to correct the wavefront error generated by a turbulent simulator. The experimental results show that the residual error is obviously reduced in comparison with that by using the SPGD method.