Experiments with active phase matching of parallel-amplified Multiline HF laser beams by a phase-locked Mach-Zehnder interferometer

Active phase matching of multiline HF laser beams by means of a phase-locked Mach-Zehnder interferometer was demonstrated by locking the interferometer to the central interference fringe at zero optical path length difference. The central fringe could be found by varying the spectral content of the input beam. Laser amplification in one leg of the interferometer decreased fringe visibility without adversely affecting locking. Single-line fringe patterns produced by an array spectrometer (while the interferometer was operated in its scanning mode) were analyzed to show that no significant dispersion occurred in the amplifier. The techniques developed have potential for measuring dispersion mismatch between larger parallel amplifiers. These experiments demonstrated in principle that a number of multiline HF amplified beams can be recombined and phase-matched to produce a high beam quality output beam.