Turbulence Compensation for Receiving and Coherent Combining via Phased Fiber Laser Array

We first demonstrate atmospheric turbulence compensation and optical coherent combining using a phased fiber laser array with the largest channels of sub-apertures. With multi-dimensional control of piston and tip/tilt phases on each sub-aperture, the co-phasing and adaptive fiber coupling of receiving beamlets have been achieved in all-fiber structure, and the mean received power increased by about 12 times and the scintillation index caused by turbulence decreased from 0.275 to 0.041 compared with open loop. This experiment shows the practicability and adaptive optics ability of the phased fiber laser array and suggests the great potential of its applications in urban free-space optical communications.