Integrated beam shaping and polarization beam combining design for fiber-coupled semiconductor laser stacks system.

The beam quality mismatch in the fast and slow axes of laser diode stacks limits their applications. An effective beam-shaping method was proposed based on a pair of step prisms. Using this technique, we can eliminate the lightless areas and achieve polarization multiplexing of laser diode stacks. Two laser diode stacks consisting of eight bars were coupled into a fiber with a core diameter of 200 mu m and a numerical aperture of 0.22. The simulation results demonstrated that the output power can reach 1083 W and the optical-optical efficiency was 84.6%. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America