A Talbot cavity is an external cavity used for the coherent beam combination of output from laser sets.
In the simplest version, it is constructed with a single mirror at half the Talbot distance from the output facet of the laser array:
The constructive interference images the near field of the array back onto the array itself at the Talbot distance, creating optical feedback.
This interference feedback forces the lasers in the array to transverse mode lock.
element laser array phase-locked by Talbot cavity is given by:[1]
Talbot beam combination is highly sensitive to transverse phase distortions even at
[2] Theory developed for Talbot cavities [3] facilitated the development of thin disk diode-pumped solid-state laser arrays.
This optics-related article is a stub.