Improved phase locking of laser arrays with nonlinear coupling

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel nonlinear coupling method in laser arrays that significantly improves phase locking sensitivity and convergence speed, enabling more efficient control of laser phases in complex arrays.

Contribution

It introduces a degenerate cavity laser setup with nonlinear coupling and an intra-cavity saturable absorber, achieving rapid and sensitive phase locking of over 30 lasers.

Findings

Over 30 lasers were phase locked and Q-switched.

Nonlinear coupling increased sensitivity to loss differences by 25 times.

Convergence to the lowest loss state was 5 times faster with nonlinear coupling.

Abstract

An arrangement based on a degenerate cavity laser for forming an array of non-linearly coupled lasers with an intra-cavity saturable absorber is presented. More than $30$ lasers were spatially phase locked and temporally Q-switched. The arrangement with nonlinear coupling was found to be $25$ times more sensitive to loss differences and converged $5$ times faster to the lowest loss phase locked state than with linear coupling, thus providing a unique solution to problems that have several near-degenerate solutions.