Method and system for the diffractive combination of beams through an integrated beamformer and sampler

A system for combining a plurality of N light beams into a single, coherent light beam, the system comprising: a source (11, 13) for emitting a plurality of N light beams having a common wavelength; a phase modulation stage (14) for fixing the phases of the N common wavelength light beams in response to phase correction signals; a diffractive optical element (25) which combines the phase fixed N common wavelength light beams into a coherent output beam (27) and diffracts a low power sample sub-beam (31) from the output coherent beam (27), the beam path And the phase of each of the N light beams is set so as to ensure alignment along a selected diffraction order direction of the diffractive optical element, so that the intensity of the combined output beam of the diffractive optical element is maximized along a single diffraction order ; a phase detection stage (35) for detecting the phase of each of the light beams included in the low-power sample sub-beam (31); and means (37) for deriving correction signals from the determined phases.