Investigation on the influence of spectral linewidth broadening on beam quality in spectral beam combination

Abstract

Spectral beam combination (SBC) is a promising method to combine multiple fiber outputs for further power scaling with the capability of maintaining high beam quality, but the beam quality will be degraded with spectral linewidth broadening, because it could result in additional angular spread in the output beam. In this paper, we described theoretical calculation as well as experimental investigation on the influence of spectral linewidth broadening on beam quality. The results show that in single SBC system the spectral linewidth should be limited to less than a few GHz in order to avoid beam quality degradation, but the linewidth requirement could be decreased to more than hundreds of GHz using a pair of parallel gratings, which reveals a feasible way to increase the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS)-free power output of single fiber laser for overall output scaling and high beam quality.