The current trends in stimulated Brillouin scattering and optical phase conjugation are overviewed. This report is formed by the selected papers presented in the “Fifth International Workshop on stimulated Brillouin scattering and phase conjugation 2010” in Japan. The nonlinear properties of phase conjugation based on stimulated Brillouin scattering and photo-refraction can compensate phase distortions in the high power laser systems, and they will also open up potentially novel laser technologies, e.g., phase stabilization, beam combination, pulse compression, ultrafast pulse shaping, and arbitrary waveform generation.

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The self-phase locking of a stimulated Brillouin scattering-phase conjugate mirror (SBS-PCM) allows a simple and scalable coherent beam combination of existing lasers. We propose a simple optical system composed of a rotating wedge and a concave mirror to overcome the power limit of the SBS-PCM. Its phase locking ability and the usefulness on the beam-combination laser are demonstrated experimentally. A four-beam combination is demonstrated using this SBS-PCM scheme. The relative phases between the beams were measured to be less than λ/24.7.

In this review paper, we introduce a self-phase controlled stimulated Brillouin scattering phase conjugate mirror (SC-SBS-PCM) and the Kumgang laser. The SC-SBS-PCM was proposed and demonstrated its success at the academic low power level, ∼100 mJ@10 Hz. The Kumgang laser is under development to verify whether the SC-SBS-PCM is operable at the kW level. It is a 4 kW beam combination laser combining four 1 kW beams using the SC-SBS-PCM. If the Kumgang laser functions successfully, it will be the most important step towards a Dream laser, a hypothetical laser with unlimited power and a high repetition rate.

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