Real-time fully digital control scheme for pulse coherent beam combining

A fully digital control scheme for non-polarization-maintaining (non-PM) nanosecond pulse coherent beam combining (CBC) is proposed, where digital locking of optical coherence by single-detector electronic-frequency tagging (LOCSET) for active phase control and stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) for active polarization control is proposed. The fully digital control scheme is integrated on a real-time field-programmable gate array (FPGA) empowered hardware platform and then experimentally validated in a four-channel all-fiber non-fully polarization-maintaining nanosecond pulse CBC system. Consequently, the system can be fully locked in 9.5 ms, and the polarization extinction ratio (PER) of the combined beam is 21.5 dB with a CBC efficiency of 95.3%. The fully digital control scheme integrates the advantages of digital LOCSET and multi-channel active polarization control, enhancing the channel scalability and the potential output power of the non-PM pulse CBC system.