Peak power scaling in Tm doped fiber lasers to MW-level

Christian Gaida; Martin Gebhardt; Pankaj Kadwani; Lasse Leick; Jes Broeng; Lawrence Shah; Martin Richardson

doi:10.1117/12.2004467

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22 March 2013 Peak power scaling in Tm doped fiber lasers to MW-level

Christian Gaida, Martin Gebhardt, Pankaj Kadwani, Lasse Leick, Jes Broeng, Lawrence Shah, Martin Richardson

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Proceedings Volume 8601, Fiber Lasers X: Technology, Systems, and Applications; 86012Y (2013) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2004467
Event: SPIE LASE, 2013, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

In this manuscript we present our recent achievements utilizing thulium-doped photonic crystal fiber rods (PCF-rods) for lasing at 2 μm wavelength and their potential as high peak power amplifiers. Two PCF-rods with 65 μm and 80 μm core diameter were first separately characterized in CW laser oscillators. The rods were pumped with a 793 nm laser diode and produced more than 18 W output power with near diffraction limited beam quality and a slope efficiency of up to 27.8 %. Implementing an intracavity high reflectivity grating for lasing wavelength selection enabled a tuning range of 180 nm from 1810 nm to 1990 nm. Thereafter the PCF-rod with 80 μm core was used as an amplifier and produced similar output powers when seeded with up to 4 W at 1960 nm from a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA). The slope efficiency in this case was reduced to 20.1 % mainly due to the center wavelength of 1960nm. We are in the process of characterizing these rods in a pulsed amplification configuration to surpass MW-level peak power with multi-mJ pulse energy.

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Christian Gaida, Martin Gebhardt, Pankaj Kadwani, Lasse Leick, Jes Broeng, Lawrence Shah, and Martin Richardson "Peak power scaling in Tm doped fiber lasers to MW-level ", Proc. SPIE 8601, Fiber Lasers X: Technology, Systems, and Applications, 86012Y (22 March 2013); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2004467

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