Employing Raman gain of optical materials is appealing for a variety of laser applications, to include fiber laser combiners. In order for a Raman combiner to be efficient, the Raman material must have high gain, low loss figure at 1st Stokes wavelength, and high loss figures at higher order Stokes wavelengths. This paper demonstrates an efficient double-clad fiber Raman combiner utilizing fused silica core as gain material with microstructured cladding designed with filtering properties implemented for suppression of higher order Stokes propagation in the core. Comprehensive study results of this Raman combiner will be presented.
We successfully fabricated a dispersion-shifted 20-um-core LMA fiber by incorporating four resonant side cores. This fiber was designed to operate at 1640-nm eye-safe wavelength and has been used in a pulsed Raman amplifier to overcome modulational instability. A peak power of 100-kW was obtained from the Raman amplifier.
We investigate high brightness pumping of multi-kW fiber amplifier in a bi-directional pumping configuration. Each pump outputs 2 kW in a 200 μm, 0.2 NA multi-mode fiber. Specialty gain fibers, with 17 μm MFD and 5-dB/meter pump absorption, have been developed. The maximum fiber amplifier output power is 2550 W, limited by multi-mode instability, with 90% O-O efficiency and M2 < 1.15. The fiber amplifier linewidth is <12 GHz. We also present kW fiber amplifier results using gain fiber with metalized fiber coating.
State-of-the-art diffraction-limited fiber lasers are presently capable of producing kilowatts of power. Power levels
produced by single elements are gradually increasing but beam combining techniques are attractive for rapidly scaling
fiber laser systems to much higher power levels. We discuss both coherent and spectral beam combining techniques for
scaling fiber laser systems to high brightness and high power. Recent results demonstrating beam combination of 500-W
commercial fiber laser amplifiers will be presented.
We demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, successful beam control of a fiber optic phased array containing a large number of polarization maintaining fibers. As many as forty-eight fibers have been coherently combined via individual all-fiber phase modulators. The residual phase error is less than 1/30th of a wave. Results with both near-field interferometric control and target-in-the-loop control have been obtained. Experimental results are compared with numerical simulations and excellent agreement has been achieved. We investigated propagation of this phased array output through a turbulent atmosphere, and used the all-fiber phase modulators for the compensation of turbulence effects on the array output. This work paves the way towards scaling such fiber optic phased arrays to very high fiber count. Eventually thousand of fibers can be controlled via such a scheme.
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