Simulation of cascaded polarization-coupled systems of broad-area semiconductor lasers

We present a brightness- and power-scalable polarization beam combining scheme for high-power, broad-area semiconductor lasers. To achieve the beam combining, we employ Lyot-filtered optical reinjection from an external cavity, which forces lasing of the individual diodes on interleaved frequency combs with overlapping envelopes and enables a high optical coupling efficiency. We demonstrate how repeatedly introduced new stages of the external cavity allow efficient coupling of 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</sup> emitters. We simulate the operation of two-four-eight-sixteen coupled emitters, analyze beam coupling efficiency, and discuss possible limiting factors of this coupling scheme.