Patent 7545838 was granted and assigned to Coherent (operating system) on June, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method of combining beams from a plurality of laser resonators includes frequency modulating the output of each of the lasers with one or more of the lasers frequency modulated out-of-phase with the others. The frequency modulated beams are directed along parallel spaced-apart paths and overlap in a plane along the paths to form a combined beam having a flat-topped intensity distribution.