Opportunities in high-power fiber lasers

Abstract

Fiber lasers and amplifiers offer unique characteristics that are derived from the use of a waveguide and the properties of rare-earth doped silica glass. Their capability for high output power, with high efficiency, has been demonstrated both in CW and pulsed regimes. Cladding-pumped Yb-doped fiber lasers have now reached beyond kW levels with good beam quality. Advances in both fiber technology and high-power multimode diode pump sources, and the inherent power scalability of cladding-pumped fibers, lie behind this power surge. However, there are still many challenges to overcome in the high-power fiber laser area. These include, for example, single-mode output at higher powers and power scaling of a three-level laser. This paper reviews novel W-type fiber and depressed clad hollow optical fiber waveguide structures designed with distributed wavelength filter characteristics to achieve an efficient and high power cladding-pumped three-level lasers such as Nd-doped fiber laser operating at 930 nm and Yb-doped fiber laser at 980 nm. Moreover, such fiber geometries enable to scale up the output power in a small and single-mode core for generating a single-mode output beam in a robust and reliable manner.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jayanta K. Sahu: orcid.org/0000-0003-3560-6152

ORCID for Johan Nilsson: orcid.org/0000-0003-1691-7959

ORCID for David J. Richardson: orcid.org/0000-0002-7751-1058

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