Wavelength beam combining of ytterbium fiber lasers in a MOPA configuration

Summary form only given. There is an increasing interest in combining large numbers of relatively low-power lasers to produce much more powerful, high-brightness laser beams. Coherent combining and wavelength (spectral) combining are the two main approaches being studied. We have been concentrating on wavelength beam combining with fiber lasers and have previously demonstrated this concept at low power. Here we discuss recent work to extend this idea to a master-oscillator power-amplifier (MOPA) configuration by adding a power amplification stage to each oscillator fiber and demonstrating recombination at higher powers.