10W ASE-free single-mode high-power double-cladding Er3+-Yb3+ amplifier

We designed a high output power double cladding erbium-ytterbium fibre amplifier that showed no amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) at 1.0 &mgr;m using a quasi singlemode fibre. The reduction of the amplified stimulated emission (ASE) at 1.0 &mgr;m was found to be the combination of fibre design and temperature effect in the core. A 10W output double cladding Er-Yb amplifier with a core/cladding fibre diameter of 10/125 &mgr;m was realized with a seed signal of 1.4 W at 1563 nm and with counter-propagating pump power of 35 W at 976 nm without any significant ASE generation at 1.0 &mgr;m. The fibre also exhibits singlemode behaviour with M2 <1.1 and a high slope efficiency of 30%. The fibre was designed to minimize ASE at 1.0 &mgr;m by heavily doping the fibre and using the appropriate ratio between Yb3+ and Er3+ ions. By incorporating into our model the core temperature increase coming from the quantum defect of the Er-Yb system, we can also predict a raise in the absorption cross-section of the ytterbium ions around 1060 nm yielding to an increase of the 1 &mgr;m ASE threshold from 14 W to 35 W pump power, which allowed us to reach a 10 W output power at 1563 nm instead of 5 W normally predicted by the theory. These results show potential power scaling of the output power or double cladding erbium ytterbium amplifier using quasi singlemode core erbium ytterbium fibre avoiding the need of large core dimension that degrades the beam quality.