Deep turbulence effects mitigation with coherent combining of 21 laser beams over 7 km

We demonstrate coherent beam combining and adaptive mitigation of atmospheric turbulence effects over 7 km under strong scintillation conditions using a coherent fiber array laser transmitter operating in a target-in-the-loop setting. The transmitter system is composed of a densely packed array of 2...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Optics letters 2016-02, Vol.41 (4), p.840-843
Main Authors: Weyrauch, Thomas, Vorontsov, Mikhail, Mangano, Joseph, Ovchinnikov, Vladimir, Bricker, David, Polnau, Ernst, Rostov, Andrey
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:We demonstrate coherent beam combining and adaptive mitigation of atmospheric turbulence effects over 7 km under strong scintillation conditions using a coherent fiber array laser transmitter operating in a target-in-the-loop setting. The transmitter system is composed of a densely packed array of 21 fiber collimators with integrated capabilities for piston, tip, and tilt control of the outgoing beams wavefront phases. A small cat's-eye retro reflector was used for evaluation of beam combining and turbulence compensation performance at the target plane, and to provide the feedback signal for control of piston and tip/tilt phases of the transmitted beams using the stochastic parallel gradient descent maximization of the power-in-the-bucket metric.
ISSN:0146-9592
1539-4794
DOI:10.1364/OL.41.000840