A Side-Pump Coupler With Refractive Index Valley Configuration for Fiber Lasers and Amplifiers

A side-pump coupler with a refractive index valley was investigated theoretically and experimentally. The high pump coupling efficiency and the suppression of backward light propagation due to the refractive index valley are illustrated. Based on the analysis, the (2+1) × 1 pump and signal coupler with both pump coupling efficiency and signal transfer efficiency of > 96% and the BR of 2.82 was implemented, which accompanied with the maximum pump power of 398 W. And based on these couplers, an all-fiber bi-directionally pumping MOPA laser with an output power of 256 W and optical-optical efficiency of 80.5% was achieved in the experiment.

[1]  Cesar Jauregui,et al.  Side-pump combiner for all-fiber monolithic fiber lasers and amplifiers , 2010 .

[2]  Francois Gonthier.  Novel designs for pump and signal fiber combiners , 2010, LASE.

[3]  Heinz P. Weber,et al.  Side-pumped fiber laser , 1996 .

[4]  Mali Gong,et al.  1.1-kW Ytterbium Monolithic Fiber Laser With Assembled End-Pump Scheme to Couple High Brightness Single Emitters , 2011, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[5]  Raphael Lavi,et al.  A novel side coupling technique for rugged all-fiber lasers and amplifiers , 2007, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[6]  J. Nilsson,et al.  High power fiber lasers , 2010, CLEO/QELS: 2010 Laser Science to Photonic Applications.

[9]  Qirong Xiao,et al.  100 W ytterbium‐doped monolithic fiber laser with fused angle‐polished side‐pumping configuration , 2011 .

[10]  Benoit Sévigny,et al.  Pump combiner loss as a function of input numerical aperture power distribution , 2009, LASE.

[11]  Bing He,et al.  Thermal effects in kilowatt all-fiber MOPA. , 2011, Optics express.

[12]  N. Peyghambarian,et al.  Efficient and scalable side pumping scheme for short high-power optical fiber lasers and amplifiers , 2004, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[13]  Victor Khitrov,et al.  High-power single-polarization and single-transverse-mode fiber laser with an all-fiber cavity and fiber-grating stabilized spectrum. , 2006, Optics letters.

[14]  Jörg Neumann,et al.  Pump and signal combiner for bi-directional pumping of all-fiber lasers and amplifiers. , 2012, Optics express.

[15]  Lew Goldberg,et al.  High efficiency side-coupling of light into optical fibres using imbedded v-grooves , 1995 .

[16]  D. Gapontsev,et al.  135W CW fiber laser with perfect single mode output , 2002, Summaries of Papers Presented at the Lasers and Electro-Optics. CLEO '02. Technical Diges.

[17]  D. Kracht,et al.  All-Fiber Counter-Propagation Pumped Single Frequency Amplifier Stage With 300-W Output Power , 2012, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[18]  Mali Gong,et al.  End-pumped 300 W continuous-wave ytterbium-doped all-fiber laser with master oscillator multi-stage power amplifiers configuration. , 2008, Optics express.

[19]  David J. Richardson,et al.  High power fiber lasers: current status and future perspectives [Invited] , 2010 .