Active coherent combining method based on multi-aperture wave front sensors

Phase synchronization methods of several lasers are widely applied in the systems with high average power and narrowness. Among different approaches of coherent combining the most significant ones are methods based on active parameters control of each laser in the system. The control is usually conducted with distributed adaptive optical systems. In most practical cases it is an adaptive system of aperture sensing which is based on optimization (maximization) of image sharpness function. The alternative system is the one with reference beam and wave front sensor (WFS) based on holographic and heterodyne principles. However, such systems are more difficult to construct. It is also impossible to use traditional adaptive optics wave front sensors in this multi-aperture system, because its work is based on the principle of building a continuous chart of phase aberrations.