With the rapid development of laser applications, single elements of diode lasers are not able to meet the increasing requirements on power and beam quality in the material processing and defense filed, whether are used as pumping sources or directly laser sources. The coupling source with high power and high beam quality, multiplexed by many single elements, has been proven to be a promising technical solution. In this paper, the authors review the development tendency of efficiency, power, and lifetime of laser elements firstly, and then introduce the progress of laser beam combining technology. The authors also present their recent progress on the high power diode laser sources developed by beam combining technology, including the 2600W beam combining direct laser source, 1000W fiber coupled semiconductor lasers and the 1000W continuous wave (CW) semiconductor laser sources with beam quality of 12.5×14[mm. mrad]².

Date Published: 16 May 2013
PDF: 13 pages
Proc. SPIE 8796, 2nd International Symposium on Laser Interaction with Matter (LIMIS 2012), 87961N (16 May 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2012332

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8796:
2nd International Symposium on Laser Interaction with Matter (LIMIS 2012)
Stefan Kaierle; Jingru Liu; Jianlin Cao, Editor(s)