Cantilevered adaptive fiber-optics collimator with a 3  mm diameter

Adaptive fiber-optics collimator (AFOC) technology enables high-precision dynamic beam pointing control, with significant potential for application in the field of beam combining of fiber lasers. In order to achieve large-scale beam combining within a small synthetic aperture, a reduced diameter of the AFOC is required. In this paper, an AFOC with a diameter of 3 mm was developed by using an integrated cantilever structure of the piezoelectric bimorph actuator. It represents, to the best of our knowledge, the smallest-diameter AFOC developed to date. The experimental results demonstrate that the AFOC can provide a deflection angle of more than 0.5 mrad at a driving voltage of 120 V, and the effective operating frequency can be above 200 Hz.