In this work, a single-frequency fiber amplifier with output power of 703 W was demonstrated at 1064 nm in an all-fiber configuration. Cascaded Yb3+-doped fiber structure with different dopant concentration and hybrid 915/976 nm pump scheme were employed in power scaling stage to improve the gain saturation for higher transverse mode instability threshold. An overall optical efficiency of 67.5% was achieved at the maximum output power and the M2 was measured to be ~1.4. A spectral linewidth of 2 kHz was achieved at the 703-W laser power, which is to the best of our knowledge, the first time that the linewidth of a kHz single-frequency fiber amplifier is characterized at such high laser power.
High-power single-frequency fiber lasers have attracted great attention in the applications of high-resolution spectroscopy, long-distance coherent communication, gravitational wave detection and some other areas, due to the advantage on narrow linewidth, low noise and so on. In this paper, we systematically summarize the recent achievements of high-power singlefrequency fiber laser oscillators and amplifiers as well as performance improvement on noise suppression, linewidth narrowing, and wavelength extension. Besides, the next development of SFFLs has been prospected.
We report a single-frequency pulsed Yb-doped fiber master-oscillator-power-amplifier at 1064nm producing output with pulse energy of 0.601 mJ for a pulse width of 95 ns at a pulse repetition frequency of 5 kHz. The Hybrid active fiber structure consisted with a piece of heavily Yb-doped 50/400 μm phosphosilicate fiber and a piece of 35/250 μm silica fiber with moderate Yb3+ doping concentration was employed to mitigate SBS effect. Besides, by pre-shaping the seed pulses, SPM-induced spectral linewidth broadening can be suppressed during power scaling.
In this paper, we report a high-power single-frequency all-fiber amplifier at 1064 nm based on cascaded hybrid active fibers. The cascaded gain fiber design, where a piece of active fiber with lower dopant concentration is spliced before the highly doped gain fiber, is proposed to effectively alleviate the thermal loads of high-power amplifier. By virtue of hybrid pump at 976 nm and 915 nm to increase the threshold of transverse mode instability (TMI) effect, an output power of 435 W is achieved from the Yb3+-doped fiber with large core diameter of 30 μm. The beam quality is well maintained with a M2 of 1.4 even at the maximum laser power.
Saturable absorption effect of unpumped active fiber can be used as a method of achieving single-frequency operation from an all-fiber oscillator. Here, the effect was studied when the signal was highly absorbed by unpumped thulium-doped fiber and the laser threshold was beyond the available pump power. We proved that the oscillator could be manipulated to the “oscillating state” by injecting auxiliary pump light to the saturable absorber fiber. This allowed using unpumped thulium-doped fiber with higher absorption to enhance the frequency selecting capability. A record single-frequency output power of 2.56 W at 1720 nm was obtained, with a slope efficiency of 44% and a linewidth of 3.3 kHz, the power scaling of which was only limited by the available power of the single-mode 1570 nm pump source. This work offers new insights into how high-power, single-frequency fiber oscillators can be produced.
We propose and demonstrate a novel method to achieve pulsed operation of thulium-doped fiber lasers at 1.7 μm. In our design, the thulium-doped fiber laser cavity was embedded within the cavity of an erbium/ytterbium-codoped fiber laser operating at 1.5 μm. The thulium-doped fiber in the erbium/ytterbium-codoped fiber laser cavity served as a saturable absorber, forcing the 1.5 μm laser to operate in a passively Q-switched scheme. The 1.7 μm thulium-doped fiber laser was in-turn pumped by the Q-switched 1.5 μm laser and was gain-switched. This resulted in the pulse duration of 1.7 μm emission was much shorter than that of 1.5 μm emission. 1.02 W average output power at 1720 nm was obtained for 10 W of pump power at 976 nm. The pulse repetition frequency, pulse energy and pulse duration were 134 kHz, 7.6 μJ and 102 ns, respectively.
A narrow-linewidth single-frequency Yb-doped nanosecond pulsed fiber laser with 27-kW peak power was demonstrated in this work. By employing the novel triangle-shape pulse with a 1-ns rise time and 13-ns fall time, the spectral linewidth of 88 MHz was achieved at the maximum output power. The signal to noise ratio was about 33 dB and no obvious residual pump power within the output laser. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that the performance of triangle-pulse fiber amplifier was demonstrated.
We observed a large optical bistability in a single-frequency thulium fiber laser with ring cavity configuration. A piece of unpumped Tm-doped fiber served as nonlinear saturable absorber (SA), which also acted as a narrow-bandpass filter by forming self-induced gratings with counter-propagate lasers and enabled single-frequency laser operation at 1720 nm. Due to the large absorption cross section of thulium ions at 1720 nm, the unpumped Tm-doped fiber has large variable losses, hence resulting in strong optical bistability. With 0.75-m SA fiber, a 4.8-W wide bistable region was achieved. The evolution of bistable region with different lengths of SA fibers was investigated. The bistable region became narrower with decreasing SA fiber length, and totally disappeared at a SA fiber length of 0.15 m. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first observation of optical bistability in thulium fiber lasers.
For anti-resonant fibers (ARF), when the diameter of cladding tube approaches the effective diameter of fiber core, the fundamental mode (FM) in core appears an index-induced mode coupling with the FM in cladding tubes. The FMs mode coupling between core and cladding forms a super FM in ARF, and simultaneously introduces an obvious suppression on the FM in core, which provides a novel theory for polarization-maintaining ARF. In this paper, we proposed a polarization-maintaining ARF (PM-ARF) with four asymmetrical cladding tubes for 2.5 THz wave. In PM-ARF, the horizontal cladding tubes are designed to generate the suppression on modes, and the vertical tubes are designed to generate the guidance for modes. Profiting from the mode coupling between core and cladding, a birefringence index of 9×10-6 is obtained by the compact PM-ARF. The mode coupling was confirmed can be combined with methods of bi-thickening the core boundary and elliptical core boundary respectively to improve the polarization-maintaining ability. Optimizing the shells of horizontal and vertical cladding tubes into different thickness respectively, and simultaneously working with the mode coupling between core and cladding, the birefringence index of ARF was improved to larger than 1×10-4. Besides, the mode coupling worked with the method of elliptical core boundary, the birefringence index was further improved to higher than 2×10-4.
We have demonstrated an efficient 1720-nm all-fiber laser with ring-cavity configuration based on commercial Tmdoped silica fiber and 1570-nm in-band pump source. The rate equation model was built up to analyze the laser performance of Tm-doped fiber, which exhibits strong absorption in 1.7-μm region. The results show that efficient laser operation can be achieved through the optimization of output coupling and the length of Tm-doped fiber. By using homemade couplers, we experimentally achieved 2.36-W laser output power under 6-W launched pump power. The slope efficiency with respect to the absorbed pump power and optical efficiency were 50.2% and 39.3%, respectively. Due to the employment of ring resonator, a narrow laser linewidth of ~4 GHz at maximum output power was observed.
In this work, the linewidth performance of triangle-shaped pulsed fiber laser (TPL) with 6.5-ns pulse width was investigated numerically and experimentally. The spectral linewidth of TPL changed with different rising times and fixed pulse width. The minimum spectral linewidth could be obtained when the rising time or falling time is equal to 0. Besides, the self-phase modulation (SPM) could be suppressed when the rising time of TPL is less than 3.25 ns, and the tunable linewidth from 77.73 MHz to 86.69 MHz was obtained at 2.1-kW peak power of pulse. It was found that experimental results are consistent with the theoretical analysis.
Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is a well established method to narrow the laser linewidth to kilohertz level, which however suffers high threshold due to the low SBS gain at the region of 2 μm. The hybrid Brillouin/thulium fiber laser (BTFL) is such an approach which could suppress the laser linewidth with low threshold and high efficiency. In this paper, an ultra-narrow linewidth hybrid Brillouin/thulium fiber laser (BTFL) was demonstrated. Through experimentally optimizing the output coupling, pump scheme, Brillouin pump power and cavity length of the laser, 344-mW laser output with a narrow linewidth of 0.93 kHz was obtained, in which the linewidth of Stokes light was suppressed more than 43 times compared with the 40 kHz linewidth of the Brillouin pump. Besides, the influences of output coupling and pump scheme on the power and linewidth behavior of a single-frequency BTFL were also experimentally investigated, and there exists a performance balance among linewidth narrowing, output power and SBS threshold. The BTFL output power was further boosted to 5.5 W by a one-stage cladding-pumped fiber amplifier, and the corresponding spectral linewidth was broadened to 1.93 kHz. The output coupling exerted a significant influence on the BTFL performance.
A 1720-nm thulium-doped all-fiber laser based on a ring-cavity configuration is demonstrated. The long-wavelength lasing near the 1.9-μm thulium emission peak was suppressed using a wavelength division multiplexer and single-mode– multimode–single-mode (SMS) fiber device, which together served as a short-pass filter instead of the grating devices usually used in 1.7-μm thulium fiber lasers. A stable hundred-milliwatt-level 1720-nm laser output with a narrow spectral linewidth on the order of gigahertz was obtained after optimizing the output coupling, the active fiber length and the SMS device.
In this paper, a single frequency thulium doped silica fiber laser operating above 2 μm based on cascaded single-modemultimode- single-mode (SMS) fiber structures incorporating a Sagnac loop was experimentally demonstrated. Based on the theoretical analysis of the trans mission properties of the SMS fiber structure and mode selection characteristic of Sagnac loop, two cascaded SMS fiber devices with same multimode fiber lengths around 3.25 cm were used in our laser system to select the specific lasing wavelength above 2 μm as well as enhance the suppression of lasing around 1900 nm. And 6.5 m unpumped TDF was employed in Sagnac loop as saturable absorber to achieve single-frequency operation. Single-longitudinal-mode (SLM) operation of the fiber laser operating at 2004.05 nm was achieved with a signal to noise ratio (SNR) more than 60dB.
Aiming at the problem of high-ring-cavity losses caused by the use of a high-insertion-loss filter components to tune the output wavelengths in a continuous-wave (CW) all-fiber optical parametric oscillator (FOPO), this paper proposes a low ring-cavity-loss tunable CW FOPO based on the cascaded single-mode-multimode-single-mode (SMS) fiber structures. By applying an axial pulling force to the SMS fiber device to adjust the transmission spectrum of the filter device, the cascaded SMS fiber devices were used to achieve a tunable CW output of the double sidebands in the range of 1494~1501 nm and 1638~1629 nm. Among them, the insertion losses of the cascaded SMS fiber devices at the selected wavelengths are less than 1 dB, and the total FOPO ring-cavity losses are no more than 5 dB.
In this paper a single frequency thulium doped silica fiber(TDF) laser operating above 2 μm based on cascaded single-mode-multimode-single-mode(SMS) structures incorporating a Sagnac loop was experimentally demonstrated. Based on the theoretical analysis of the transmission properties of the SMS fiber structure and mode selection characteristic of Sagnac loop, two cascaded SMS fiber devices with same multimode fiber lengths around 3.24 cm were used in our laser system to select the specific lasing wavelength above 2 μm as well as enhancing the suppression of lasing around 1900 nm. And 6.5 m unpumped TDF were employed in Sagnac loop as saturable absorber to achieve single frequency operation. Single-longitudinal-mode operation of the fiber laser at 2004.05 nm has been achieved with a signal to noise ratio (SNR) more than 60dB.
A high-energy, single-frequency fiber laser with long pulse duration of 100 ns has been experimentally investigated in an all-fiber architecture. Only 34-cm long heavily Yb-doped phosphate fiber was employed in power scaling stage to efficiently suppress the Stimulated Brillouin effect (SBS). In the experiment, 0.47 mJ single pulse energy was achieved in power scaling stage at the pump power of 16 W. The pre-shaped pulse was gradually broadened from 103 to 140 ns during the amplification without shape distortion.
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