5 kW Near-Diffraction-Limited and 8 kW High-Brightness Monolithic Continuous Wave Fiber Lasers Directly Pumped by Laser Diodes

Tandem pumping technique are traditionally adopted to develop &#x003E;3-kW continuous-wave (cw) Yb<sup>3&#x002B;</sup>-doped fiber lasers, which are usually pumped by other fiber lasers at shorter wavelengths (1018&#x00A0;nm e.g.,). Fiber lasers directly pumped by laser diode...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Qiang Fang, Jinhui Li, Wei Shi, Yuguo Qin, Yang Xu, Xiangjie Meng, Robert A. Norwood, Nasser Peyghambarian
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2017-01-01
Series:IEEE Photonics Journal
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8025378/
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Summary:Tandem pumping technique are traditionally adopted to develop &#x003E;3-kW continuous-wave (cw) Yb<sup>3&#x002B;</sup>-doped fiber lasers, which are usually pumped by other fiber lasers at shorter wavelengths (1018&#x00A0;nm e.g.,). Fiber lasers directly pumped by laser diodes have higher wall-plug efficiency and are more compact. Here we report two high brightness monolithic cw fiber laser sources at 1080 nm. Both lasers consist of a cw fiber laser oscillator and one laser-diode pumped double cladding fiber amplifier in the master oscillator-power amplifier configuration. One laser, using 30-&#x03BC;m-core Yb<sup>3&#x002B;</sup>-doped fiber as the gain medium, can produce &#x003E;5-kW average laser power with near diffraction-limited beam quality (M<sup>2</sup>&lt;1.8). The slope efficiency of the fiber amplifier with respect to the launched pump power reached 86.5&#x0025;. The other laser utilized 50-&#x03BC;m-core Yb<sup>3&#x002B;</sup>-doped fiber as the gain medium and produced &#x003E;8-kW average laser power with high beam quality (M<sup>2</sup>: &#x223C; 4). The slope efficiency of the fiber amplifier with respect to the launched pump power reach 83&#x0025;. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first detailed report for &#x003E;5-kW near-diffraction-limited and &#x003E;8-kW high-brightness monolithic fiber lasers directly pumped by laser diodes.
ISSN:1943-0655