Highly scalable femtosecond coherent beam combining demonstrated with 19 fibers

Coherent beam combining in the femtosecond regime of a record number of 19 fibers is demonstrated. The interferometric phase measurement technique, particularly well suited to phase-lock a very large number of fibers, is successfully demonstrated in the femtosecond regime. A servo loop is implemented to control piezoelectric fiber stretchers for both phase and delay variation compensation. The residual phase errors are below λ/60 rms. Nearly 50% of the total energy is contained in the far-field central lobe. After compression, we obtain a combined pulse width of 300 fs identical to the master oscillator pulse width.