A novel acoustic and gain tailored Yb-doped photonic crystal fiber is used to demonstrate over 800 W single-frequency output power with excellent beam quality at 1064 nm. The large mode area fiber core is composed of 7 individually doped segments arranged to create three distinct acoustic regions and preferential gain overlap with the fundamental optical mode. This design leads to suppression of both stimulated Brillouin scattering and modal instability. To the best of our knowledge, the output power represents the highest power ever reported from a near diffractionlimited single-frequency fiber laser. Furthermore, we show that by using a broadband seed, 1.22 kW of output power is obtained without the onset of the modal instability.

Date Published: 7 March 2014
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 8961, Fiber Lasers XI: Technology, Systems, and Applications, 896103 (7 March 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2042873

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8961:
Fiber Lasers XI: Technology, Systems, and Applications
Siddharth Ramachandran, Editor(s)