Spectrally beam combined fiber lasers for high power, efficiency, and brightness

Spectral Beam Combining (SBC) of fiber lasers provides a simple, robust architecture for power scaling lasers to high power. With appropriate designs, power scaling beyond the single fiber limit can be achieved while maintaining near diffraction limited beam quality and high efficiency. We present experimental results where we achieved > 3 kW at an M2 = 1.35 and > 39% E-O efficiency by combining 12 individual fiber lasers into a single high brightness beam.