We proposed a novel wavelength-spread compression technique for spectral beam combining of a diode laser array. A reflector, which is parallel to the grating, is introduced to achieve a double pass with a single grating. This facilitated the reduction of the wavelength spread by half and doubled the number of combined elements in the gain range of the diode laser. We achieved a power of 26.1 W under continuous wave operation using a 19 element single bar with a wavelength spread of 6.3 nm, which is nearly half of the original wavelength spread of 14.2 nm, demonstrating the double-compressed spectrum capability of this structure. The spectral beam combining efficiency was 63.7%. The grating efficiency and reflector reflectance were both over 95%; hence, the efficiency loss of the double-pass grating with a reflector is acceptable. In contrast to double-grating methods, the proposed method introduces a reflector that efficiently uses the single grating and shows significant potential for a more efficient spectral beam combining of diode laser arrays.

We propose a nonparallel double-grating structure in a spectral-beam combining technique, where two gratings are placed nonparallel satisfying the Littrow mount in the focal region of the convergent lens. The most attractive advantage of this approach is that it will compress the spectral span into half of its original spectrum, which means the number of combined elements can be doubled in the gain range of diode lasers. Experimental results demonstrate that the CW output power of the combined beam is 30.9 W with a spectral span of 7.0 nm, compared with its original spectrum span of 13.6 nm, and the spectral beam combining efficiency is 70.5%. In consideration that a single grating could have a high efficiency of >97% in a bandwidth of over ten nanometers, the efficiency loss of the grating pair should be less than 6%, which is acceptable for most applications, so this method of using double gratings should be highly interesting for practical applications when a nearly doubled number of diode lasers could be combined into one single laser compared with the previous single-grating methods.