Analysis of Major Error Factors in Coherent Beam Combination: Phase, Tip Tilt, Polarization Angle, and Beam Quality

The major error factors that degrade the efficiency of coherent beam combining (CBC) are numerically studied in a comprehensive manner, paying particular attention to phase, tip-tilt, polarization angle, and beam quality. The power in the bucket (PIB), normalized to the zero-error PIB, is used as a figure of merit to quantify the effect of each error factor. To maintain a normalized PIB greater than or equal to 95% in a 3-channel CBC configuration, the errors in phase, tip-tilt, and polarization angle should be less than 1.06 radians, 1.25 ㎛, and 1.06 radians respectively, when each of the three parameters is calculated independently with the other two set to zero. In a worst-case scenario of the composite errors within the parameter range for the independent-95%-normalized-PIB condition, the aggregate effect would reduce the normalized PIB to 83.8%. It is noteworthy that the PIB performances of a CBC system, depending on phase and polarization-angle errors, share the same characteristic feature. A statistical approach for each error factor is also introduced, to assess a CBC system with an extended number of channels. The impact of the laser's beam-quality factor M2 on the combining efficiency is also analyzed, based on a super-Gaussian beam. When M2 increases from 1 to 1.3, the normalized PIB is reduced by 2.6%, 11.8%, 12.8%, and 13.2% for a single-channel configuration and 3-, 7-, and 19-channel CBC configurations respectively. This comprehensive numerical study is expected to pave the way for advances in the evaluation and design of multichannel CBC systems and other related applications.