Laser Beam Combining Methods

This book shows most of the methods used to place beams one on top of the other to increase power, but is more of a concepts book to give the reader an idea of the different methods with simple drawing examples and a few formulas to back them up. I was hoping the book would also cover PBS cubes and knife edges, but I guess knife edging isn't technically "combining" but rather stacking or placing beams close together. However PBS cube combining of beams is something which could have been mentioned, although perhaps too simple to be of interest to most, I would have liked to have seen what can be done with them, maybe there are some twists I am unaware of.I gave the book three stars solely due to my disappointment over 88 pages turning into 74, due to the last 14 pages being nothing but advertisements for the authors other books, and the way the Kindle format makes a book appear to have far more information than it really does due to each page being about the quarter of the size you would find in a printed book. This was my only disappointment, the way the information was presented was done very well, the illustrations made complex techniques easy to understand. Although the price might seem high for such a little book, forget trying to find another book on this subject for anywhere close to 30 dollars by another author, this was the least expensive I could find, other books on the subject priced well over 100 dollars.The author obviously believes in keeping the descriptions of the methods as simple and concise as possible, this is very helpful to understanding what is being presented, but at the same time for my money makes the book too small. Perhaps photographs of the types of optic setups being explained could also be included to make us feel better about spending this much for so little information, even if concise by design. (Edit: Feb 2017, the price was reduced to a fraction of its earlier price).

This book provides a great introduction to laser beam combining methods and concepts. It covers the basics ranging from spectral beam combining to coherent beam combining. The book is intended to be an overview of this much researched area and it does a very good job of introducing the reader to the various methods and techniques constructed and tested with laser diodes, fiber lasers and even CO2 lasers. The reader should have completed at least second year college level course work on the basics of lasers, laser beam propagation, and wave theory to get the most out of this book. This is a great starting point for a researcher to get an understanding of the various methods that have been tested and developed over the past 35 years.