The 260-W coherent beam combining of two compact fibre amplifier chains

Coherent beam combining of two fibre amplifier chains with a total power of 260 W in a compact system using the stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) algorithm is demonstrated. A 150 MHz linewidth fibre laser is built and introduced for high-power amplification to mitigate stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). Compact high-power amplifier chains are built with low power all-fibre system and high-power bulk free-optics fibre amplifiers. When the total power is about 260 W, active phase-locking of two high-power amplifiers is demonstrated using the SPGD algorithm. In closed-loop, the power in the main lobe increases 1.68 times, the visibility is increased from 0 to 0.62, and the phase residual error is less than \lambda/10.