Coherent fiber combining by digital holography.

We present an original technique for coherent beam combining of an array of fiber amplifiers based on self-adaptive digital holography. In this method, the phase errors between the fibers of the array are compensated by using the diffracted phase-conjugated -1 order of a digital hologram. The proposed method is compatible with a large number of fibers and simply implemented with a CCD detector matrix and a spatial light modulator. This concept is analyzed and experimentally demonstrated with three polarization-maintaining passive fibers at 1.06 microm.