High-Power Diode Lasers for Direct Applications

Diode-laser systems have a good chance to be used as light sources for direct applications. For this purpose a large number of relatively weak light bundles originating from individual oscillators have to be coupled to a single powerful beam. The coupling may be done in a completely incoherent way in cases where only a moderate beam quality is appropriate or with increasing degrees of coherence corresponding to applications where high demands on the quality are necessary. In this article all current methods of incoherent as well as of coherent beam combining are described and judged with respect to their present and future potential.

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