Improved Phase Locking of Laser Arrays with Nonlinear Coupling

An arrangement based on a degenerate cavity laser for forming an array of nonlinearly coupled lasers with an intracavity saturable absorber is presented. More than 30 lasers were spatially phase locked and temporally Q switched. The arrangement with nonlinear coupling was found to be 25 times more sensitive to loss differences and converged five times faster to the lowest loss phase locked state than with linear coupling, thus providing a unique solution to problems that have several near-degenerate solutions.