Applications of Fiber Array You May Not Know

1. Use fiber array in astronomical telescopes

Fibers are sometimes used to transmit light from the telescope to other equipment for further analysis, such as high-resolution spectral analysis. Here, the fiber array allows people to apply this technology to multiple viewing directions at the same time.

2. Beam combination of fiber array

Linear fiber array is particularly suitable for spectral beam combination. For example, each fiber in the array can be used to realize a fiber laser, and their beams can be combined with a diffraction grating. Coherent beam combination can also use a 2D fiber array combined with a suitable lens array to collimate the light.

Here, each fiber is fed by the single frequency and phase stable output of the fiber amplifier. Very accurate positioning of all components is essential to obtain high beam quality output.

3. Fiber array is used for laser material processing

Various techniques of laser material processing can be performed at a greatly increased processing speed by using a parallelization, where multiple points on the sample are illuminated at the same time, and each point comes from the radiation of a fiber in an array.

For arrays of limited size, a single optical device can be used to process the entire radiation. This technique can be implemented with one-dimensional or two-dimensional fiber arrays.