Ytterbium-doped large mode area all-solid photonic bandgap fiber amplifiers were used to demonstrate <400 W of output power at 1064 nm. In an initial set of experiments, a fiber with a core diameter of ~50 μm, and a calculated effective area of 1450 μm² in a straight fiber, was used to generate approximately 600 W. In this case, the input seed was modulated using a sinusoidal format at a frequency of 400 MHz. The output, however, was multimode as the fiber design did not allow for single-mode operation at this wavelength. A second fiber was then fabricated to operate predominantly in single mode at 1064 nm by having the seed closer to the short wavelength edge of the bandgap. This fiber was used to demonstrate 400 W of single-frequency output with excellent beam quality. As the signal power exceeded 450 W, there was significant degradation in the beam quality due to the modal instability. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, the power scaling results obtained in this work far exceed results from prior state of the art all-solid photonic bandgap fiber lasers.

Date Published: 4 March 2015
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9344, Fiber Lasers XII: Technology, Systems, and Applications, 934406 (4 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2082709

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9344:
Fiber Lasers XII: Technology, Systems, and Applications
L. Brandon Shaw, Editor(s)