Spectral beam combining of a broad-stripe diode laser array in an external cavity

Summary form only given. Beam combining of the outputs from many laser gain elements, while maintaining the beam quality of a single element, is an attractive approach for scaling the power and brightness of laser systems. Most beam-combining efforts have tried coherent combining of the outputs from multiple elements, which requires controlling the relative phases of the elements to much less than 2/spl pi/. Here, we report on spectral beam combining of the outputs from a broad-stripe, linear, diode laser array, which eliminates the need for phase control.