A tapered Er-doped fiber amplifier for high peak power pulses amplification has been developed and tested. The core diameter changed from 15.8 µm (mode field diameter (MFD) 14.5 µm) to 93 µm (MFD 40 µm) along 3.7 meters maintaining single-mode performance at 1555 nm (according to the S2-method, the part of the power of high-order modes does not exceed 1.5 %). The amplification of 0.9 ns pulses with spectral width below 0.04 nm up to a peak power above 200 kW (limited by self-phase modulation) with a slope pump-to-signal conversion efficiency of 15.6% was demonstrated.
In this paper, we have developed Yb-doped fiber suitable for creation of all-fiber seed laser schemes operating near 977 nm. The fiber was based on a ring-doping design (cladding was partially doped with Yb-ions), which allowed us to fabricate a relatively small core and provide mode field diameter (MFD) of the active fiber comparable with standard fibers (to achieve small splicing losses with commercially available optical fibers) and, simultaneously, increase absorption from the cladding to keep a reasonably high lasing efficiency. So MFDx of the fiber was 12 μm, MFDy was 14 μm. Outer silica cladding of the active fiber was decreased to diameter of 80 μm and a special pump and signal combiner was used to inject pump and signal into the active fiber. Based on the developed Yb-doped fiber an all-fiber polarization maintaining mode-locked laser with central wavelength around 977 nm was demonstrated for the first time. SESAM was used as a saturable absorber. The laser was self-starting for pump powers above 4.6 W, with the output power of 3 mW. The autocorrelation was the best fitted with sech2 profile and pulse duration was estimated to be as long as 9.5 ps. The fundamental cavity frequency corresponded to the pulse repetition rate of 33.532 MHz. Signal-to-noise ratio measured in the radio frequency range was more than 50 dB, the line width was below 1 kHz, which indicate ultimate stability of the fabricated mode-lock laser.
We developed a highly efficient double-clad Yb-doped polarization-maintaining fiber to be implemented for small-signal amplification near 0.976 μm. The fiber was designed to have a relatively small mode field diameter compatible with standard step-index single-mode optical fibers. Another feature of the fiber was a small threshold for 0.976 μm signal amplification, which was achieved by a creation of a thin inner cladding (80 μm diameter). The unique design of the fiber allowed us to construct successfully an all-fiber picoseconds mode-locked laser at 0.98 μm for the first time to the best of our knowledge.
Phosphate glass is an attractive material for rare-earth-doped fiber manufacturing because high doping levels are possible without introducing negative effects such as up-conversion or increased non-radiative recombination. In this paper we present a novel PM heavily Yb-doped polarization maintaining large mode area phosphate fiber and a < 100 W power level amplifier based on this fiber. The fiber was fabricated by a rod-in-tube technique. An 18 cm long piece of the fiber was used to build a high-power all-fiber amplifier. 106 W of output power at 1030 nm was achieved with 55 % slope efficiency with respect to the launched pump power. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest average power ever demonstrated for short phosphate fiber lasers.
An all-fiber pulsed erbium laser with pulse width of 2.4 ns working in a MOPA configuration has been created. Cladding pumped double clad erbium doped large mode area fiber was used in the final stage amplifier. Peculiarity of the current work is utilization of custom-made multimode diode wavelength stabilized at 981±0.5 nm – wavelength of maximum absorption by Er ions. It allowed us to shorten Er-doped fiber down to 1.7 m and keep a reasonably high pump-to signal conversion efficiency of 8.4%. The record output peak power for all-fiber amplifiers of 84 kW was achieved within 1555.9±0.15 nm spectral range.
In this work we present cost effective all-fiber high power pump laser near 1530 nm. The laser was based on the novel Er-doped fiber with core/cladding diameter of 100/125 μm and optimized core composition. Exploiting of this fiber together with original laser scheme allowed us to reach wall-plug efficiency as high as ~17.5 % and, at the same time, provide robust wavelength-stabilized operation. Developed laser was tested as a pump source for single-mode Tefloncoated double-clad Er-doped fiber at 1585 nm. Slope efficiency of 45 % was demonstrated in MOPA configuration
In this work we present a monolithic lidar system, based on a newly-developed double-clad large mode area (LMA) polarization-maintaining Er-doped fiber and specially designed LMA passive components. Optimization of the fiber designs resulted in as high as 100 W of SBS limited peak power. The amplifier and its passive components (circulator and collimator) were integrated in an existing lidar system. The enhanced lidar system provides three times increase of scanning range compared to one based on standard telecom-grade amplifiers.
In this work we present results on the amplification of narrow-linewidth nanosecond pulses in a recently developed ytterbium-free erbium-doped large mode area fiber cladding pumped at 980 nm. At first, a co-propagating all fiber amplifier scheme was used. Using 1 m of active fiber length in such configuration a peak power of 4 kW limited by instabilities caused by stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) was achieved. To the best of our knowledge this is the highest peak power ever reported for single-frequency single mode silica-based fiber sources near 1550 nm. Then all fiber counter-pumped configuration with 6 m of active fiber was used and peak power of 900 W was obtained. In this case peak power was limited by SBS generation in a passive fiber at the laser output. Slope electrical-to-optical conversion efficiency of 8 % demonstrated in such scheme is a record value for kW-level single mode single-frequency Er-doped nanosecond fiber lasers.
In this Report, we present a record-high-peak-power single-frequency master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) system
based on a newly developed double-clad large-mode-area Yb-free Er-doped fiber (DC-LMA-EDF). A fiber Bragg
grating wavelength-stabilized fiber-coupled diode laser at λ=1551 nm with ~2 MHz spectral width was used as the
master oscillator. Its radiation was externally modulated with a 5 kHz repetition rate and 92 ns pulse duration and then
amplified in a core-pumped Er-doped fiber amplifier up to an average power of 4 mW. The amplified spontaneous
emission (ASE) generated at the last preamplifier stage was suppressed by a narrow-band (0.7 nm) DWDM filter. The
last MOPA stage was based on the recently developed single-mode DC-LMA-EDF with a mode field diameter of 25
microns and pump clad-absorption of 3 dB/m at λ=980 nm. The pump and the signal were launched into this fiber
through a commercial pump combiner in a co-propagating amplifier scheme. At first, we used a 3-m long DC-LMAEDF.
In such configuration, a peak power of 800 W was achieved at the output of the amplifier together with a ~ 12 %
pump conversion slope efficiency. Further power scaling was limited by SBS. After that we shortened the fiber length to
1 m. As a result, owing to large unabsorbed pump power, the efficiency decreased to ~5 %. However, a peak power of
more than 3.5 kW was obtained before the SBS threshold. In this case, the pulse shape changed and its duration
decreased to ~60 ns owing to inversion depletion after propagation of the forward front of the pulse. To the best of our
knowledge, the peak power of more than 3.5 kW reported here is the highest value ever published for a single-frequency
single-mode silica-based fiber laser system operating near λ=1550 nm.
The use of double-clad fibers for short pulses amplification requires high active ions concentration in order to keep the active fiber length short. In the case of Er-doped fibers an increase of concentration leads to a significant drop of efficiency due to Er ions clustering. We have demonstrated through numerical simulation that efficiency of amplifiers based on double-clad P2O5-Al2O3-SiO2 (PAS) Er-doped fibers decreases slower with Er-concentration growth if compared with standard Al2O3-SiO2 fibers. In this paper, we present single-mode large-mode-area heavily Er-doped double-clad fiber based on PAS glass matrix for short pulses amplification. The developed PAS fiber has a 36 μm singlemode core and a small signal cladding absorption of 3 dB/m at 980 nm leading to an optimal fiber length in range of 5-8 m depending on the central wavelength. At first, an all-fiber nanosecond MOPA at 1560 nm was built using our PAS fiber as the final amplifier. We obtained 28 W of average output power (efficiency of 25 % with respect to the launched pump power at 976) limited by amplified spontaneous emission. Pulse energy of 1.5 mJ was achieved at pump power level of ~120 W. We believe that it is the first demonstration of mJ-energy level single-mode nanosecond fiber system. Then, direct amplification of 100-fs source was performed using this fiber. We obtained 12 nJ pulse energy and 100 kW of peak power from the fiber which is close to the record value for Er-doped fiber amplifiers.
Power scaling of Yb-free Er-doped fiber lasers is extremely challenging due to low Er ion absorption cross-section and growth of unbleachable loss at high Er concentrations because of clustering effects. Hence, usual double-clad Er-doped fibers suffer from low efficiency. We present an efficient high power all-fiber amplifier based on our newly developed Yb-free Er-doped fiber. Proper core composition and relatively low Er3+ concentration mitigates clustering effect. Furthermore, large single-mode core diameter of 34 um increases the pump absorption and decreases the fiber length. Our amplifier consists in the specialty Er fiber pumped through a commercially available pump combiner by means of 6 pigtailed multimode diodes (D=105 um, NA=0.15, input pump power of 275W). The signal source is a low power continuous wave fiber laser spliced to the amplifier. Therefore we built truly all-fiber laser without any free space coupling. We obtained 103 W of amplified signal limited only by the available pump power. Pump conversion efficiency is as high as 37 %. To the best of our knowledge this is the highest power ever demonstrated for Yb-free Er-doped lasers pumped at 976 nm. This power level is similar to that obtained in resonantly pumped Er-doped fiber lasers.
In this paper, we propose a novel all-fiber laser scheme with the output wavelength of 1565 nm based on a new Er-doped
fiber design. A conventional commercially available pump source at 980nm (D=105μm, NA=0.2) is used for pumping.
A high slope efficiency of 28% comparable with those in Er-Yb lasers was achieved owing to the utilization of the novel
P2O5-Al2O3-SiO2 (PAS) glass as the host for Er3+ ions. A relatively low in-cavity fiber length (~14m) becomes possible
owing to a small outer fiber diameter (80μm) and the use of a fiber taper (105μm to 80μm) for launching the pump.
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