Laser Diodes Power Scaling Techniques

The limits that the development of single laser device (both semiconductor laser and fiber laser) has reached and hardly can overpass are discussed and an overview on the different techniques to combine multiple lasers into a single beam with greater power and quality is presented. Between them, for the promising results that have already been obtained and its importance in future research ,coherent combining techniques have been investigated in detail. To this purpose a MOPA system seeded with a fiber laser have been numerically simulated on Matlab and an active phase correction algorithm has been validated. In the last part of the thesis, the results of an experiment on spectral beam combining, another promising power scaling technique, are described. Wavelength locking using as feedback the 1st order of a blazed diffraction grating have been demonstrated with multiple diodes.