Incoherent beam combining using stimulated Brillouin scattering in multimode fibers

A beam combining technique for producing a single, spatially coherent beam from two mutually incoherent (temporally and spatially) lasers is demonstrated and the spatial coherence properties of the resulting beam are characterized. The technique is based on simultaneous excitation of stimulated Brillouin scattering by two independent lasers operating at two different wavelengths in a long multimode optical fiber. Though spectrally independent, the resulting Stokes beams produce essentially identical intensity distributions corresponding to the fundamental fiber mode.