Design of an external cavity semiconductor laser for intra-cavity beam combining

Injection semiconductor lasers have achieved a considerable role in fundamental research and technological applications because of their numerous advantages with respect to other types of laser, such as high conversion efficiency, low power consumption, small size and low cost. Nevertheless, the maximum power that can be extracted from a single laser chip is relatively small. Most of the research efforts are nowadays dedicated to find novel strategies to increase the laser power at no expense of the laser brightness. Currently, the most used solution relies on the combination of different laser beams and, depending on the application, different types of combining can be identified. In this work, we will present the numerical modeling of a novel laser resonator design that makes possible the interferometric combination of beams coming from different gain chips in an intra-cavity configuration to increase the overall laser power with no compromise on the laser brightness.