An ultra-short wavelength operation of Tm-doped all fiber laser based on fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) was developed. A bi-directional pump configuration for the ultra-short wavelength operation was designed and investigated for the first time. the laser yielded 3.15W of continuous-wave output at 1706.75nm with a narrow-linewidth of ~50pm and a maximum slope efficiency of 42.1%. The dependencies of the slope efficiencies and pump threshold of the laser versus the length of active fiber and reflectivity of the output mirror (FBG) were investigated in detail. An experimental comparative study between two Thulium-doped fiber lasers (TDFLs) with two different pumping configuration(forward unidirectional pumping and bidirectional pumping) was presented. It is indisputable that the development of 1.7μm silicate fiber lasers with Watt-level output power open up a number of heart-stirring and tempting application windows.

Date Published: 28 February 2017
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 10256, Second International Conference on Photonics and Optical Engineering, 102561F (28 February 2017); doi: 10.1117/12.2256818

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10256:
Second International Conference on Photonics and Optical Engineering
Chunmin Zhang; Anand Asundi, Editor(s)