<title>Multisegment coherent beam combining</title>

Abstract

Scaling laser systems to large sizes for power beaming and other applications can sometimes be simplified by combining a number of smaller lasers. However, to fully utilize this scaling, coherent beam combination is necessary. This requires measuring and controlling each beam's pointing and phase relative to adjacent beams using an adaptive optical system.We have built a sub-scale brass-board to evaluate various methods for beam-combining. It includes a segmented adaptive optic and several different specialized wavefront sensors that are fabricated using diffractive optics methods. We have evaluated a number of different phasing algorithms, including hierarchical and matrix methods, and have demonstrated phasing of several elements. The system is currently extended to a large number ofisegments to evaluate various scaling Keywords: adaptive optic, wavefront sensor, coherent beam combiningmethodologies.r :