Confined-doped ytterbium fibers for beam quality improvement: fabrication and performance

By confining the Yb doping within a smaller radius in the center of the core of the few-mode large-mode-area fiber, the fundamental mode, which overlaps better with the Yb ions, sees higher gain than the higher order modes, and dominates the output. Hence, improved beam quality can be achieved. A confined-doped fiber with 41/395μm core/cladding diameters is fabricated by Direct Nanoparticle Deposition (DND) process. The fiber is characterized in an amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) source setup. Near-diffraction-limited beam quality (M2~1.3) is experimentally demonstrated.

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