Abstract
We report on progress toward power scaling Yb fiber lasers beyond kW levels by an efficient and versatile architecture that maintains near diffraction limited beam quality. For this work, power scaling is performed at two distinct levels. The first utilizes a diffraction grating to spectrally beam combine (SBC) the output from several master-oscillator, poweramplifier (MOPA) fiber lasers with a goal of producing high quality combined beams with > 1 kW of power. The second involves scaling individual MOPA outputs to > 200 W, thereby reducing the number of lasers required for SBC. As a first step toward reaching these goals, we have developed Yb fiber MOPAs producing up to 208 W of polarized, narrow band, and near diffraction limited output and have demonstrated two-channel fiber laser SBC with a power combining efficiency of 93%, a combined beam power of 258 W, and a dispersed axis M2 of 1.06. These results represent a significant advance in high brightness, spectrally beam combined laser systems.
