We obtained 51 W of UV laser light at 343nm for 8 ns temporally square-shape pulse at 400 kHz repetition rate which corresponds to a peak power of 42.5kW and a conversion rate of 38% from a 133W linearly polarized signal at 1030nm. This high UV power is achieved by third harmonic generation of infrared beam which is generated thanks to a newly developed Ytterbium-doped rod-type high-power amplifier effectively singlemode fiber with a hybrid hexagonal and aperiodic cladding design. Two fibers with MFD at 47µm and 67µm were tested. The 47µm MFD fiber allow to reach up to 200W of singlemode signal before the TMI appearance. This fiber can deliver 150 W of 1030 nm signal with a 250 W pump light, for different nanosecond pulse durations and repetition rates with excellent beam quality (M²<1.1).
We developed two Ytterbium-doped rod-type effective singlemode fibers based on new hexagonal FA-LPF design, exhibiting MFD of 47μm and 67μm. Both fibers can deliver 150W of 1030nm signal for 250W of pump power, characterized in a MOPA set-up for different nanosecond pulse durations and repetition rate with excellent beam quality (M2 ⪅ 1.1). Using the 47μm MFD fiber, TMI threshold has been measured for signal power slightly higher than 200W. Using the 67μm MFD fiber, we performed, through a third harmonic generation, the creation of 51W signal power at 343nm for 8ns temporally square pulse at 400 kHz repetition rate.
In this communication, we report for the first time on a homemade 55 µm core VLMA “Yb-free” Er-doped aluminosilicate double-clad fiber manufactured by the REPUSIL powder sintering technology and its implementation within two different laser configurations emitting around 1560 nm, both pumped at 976 nm. First, a free-running free-space CW oscillator delivers up to 40 W of average power with optical-to-optical efficiency of 30 % and near-diffraction-limited beam, despite the large core size. In a second experiment, the fiber is used as the main amplifier of a MOPA system delivering up to 10 nJ pulses at GHz repetition rate.
In this work, two new interferometric sensors based on multicore optical fibers for the measurement of strain with the ultimate goal of traffic monitoring are presented. The operating principle of each sensor relied on the monitoring of the phase shift difference accumulated between the supermodes of the structure of the multicore segment in a full round trip. The strain characterization for both sensors resulted in a linear response, with sensitivities of -4.073·10-3 rad/με and - 4.389·10-3 rad/με for the aligned and V-shaped cases respectively, and one-hour instabilities below 4.6·10-3 rad with a 95% confidence level. These results suggest its feasibility in applications requiring high sensitivities over very wide strain ranges, such as heavy-vehicle traffic monitoring. To corroborate the hypothesis, both sensors were integrated into the pavement and their response to the traffic was analyzed.
Many applications such as nonlinear microscopy and strong field optoelectonics require high-energy (> 100 nJ) ultrashort (< 100 fs) pulses above 1.55 µm out of a singlemode fiber. Here, we report on high-energy amplification in tapered Er-doped fiber fabricated by the powder technique. The system based on direct amplification is free from stretcher and compressor units. We generate 90 fs MW-class pulses at 1600 nm by amplification and management of nonlinear effects in the tapered fiber. Despite the output 100 µm core diameter, the emitted beam is near-diffraction limited.
In this work we present investigation of TMI in Yb-doped FA-LPF using spatially and temporally resolved imaging. We present ST-measurements that are clearly describing the system noises and that can be used to optimize amplifier systems in order to mitigate TMI. Comparative TMI measurements between the same FA-LPF in amplifier and laser configuration are also presented. These measurements show similar results with respect to optical efficiencies but large differences with respect to TMI.
We present a monolithic fiber optic configuration for generating temporally coherent supercontinuum (SC) pulsed emission with the shortest pulse duration presented to date, to our knowledge, by an all-fiber source. Few-cycle pulses as short as 14.8 fs are obtained, with central emission wavelength of 1060 nm, repetition rate of 75 MHz and average power of 250 mW. The SC generation is obtained by pumping an all-normal dispersion (ANDi) photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with a mode-locked Yb fiber laser. Spectral broadening by self-phase modulation preserves compressible pulses in the temporal domain. Compared to previously reported configurations exploiting ANDi PCFs, all stages of our source are fiber based and fiber coupled between them. Avoidance of free-space propagation between stages confers unequalled robustness, efficiency and cost-effectiveness to this novel configuration. The ANDi PCF was designed and produced to provide a convex, flat-top dispersion curve with group velocity dispersion comprised between -20 and 0 ps/nm/km in the wavelength range from 900 to 1200 nm. A d-scan system was designed and built to compress and characterize the pulses. The spectrum, wider than 150 nm, supports a Fourier limit pulse duration of 13.7 fs, and pulses have been actually compressed down to 14.8 fs, which demonstrates a high level of temporal coherence in the achieved supercontinuum; second- and third-order dispersion of the pulses are measured as low as -145 fs2 and 875 fs3, respectively. The source has been integrated in a twophoton fluorescence and second-harmonic generation microscopy setup, where 3D images of biological samples have been successfully obtained.
Fiber lasers are a great source for tunable lasers due to the wide and relatively flat gain spectra of rare earth transitions in a glassy host (as compared to crystals). Thulium (Tm)-doped fibers, in particular, offer an extremely wide tunability of up to 330 nm in the 2μm wavelength region in a dual gain module configuration1. More recently, new concepts have emerged, which allow the synchronized emission of two or even more wavelengths2. These sources are particularly useful for nonlinear frequency conversion via four-wave mixing (FWM) or difference frequency generation (DFG). We will present a very versatile fiber-integrated approach based on Fiber-Bragg-Grating (FBG) arrays implemented in a theta-shaped cavity. The Tm-doped fiber source emits typical average powers of 0.5W and is tunable from 1931nm to 2040nm. The emission linewidth follows the spectral characteristic of the FBG and is typically 30GHz in our case. This concept allows a constant wavelength-independent repetition rate as well as a synchronous emission of two or even three independently tunable wavelengths. The tuning is performed purely electronically by optical gating, and in addition the pulse duration can be tuned between 4ns and 25ns. The switching speed is very fast and was measured to be less than 10μs. These experiments will be contrasted with a different approach based on a VLMA fiber associated to a set of two volume Bragg gratings (VBG), one of them being angle-tunable. This concept allows pulsed (Q-switched) as well as CW operation and features a continuous and wider tunability of up to 144nm especially and also the dual wavelength mode. The output power was > 4.5W in CW mode and pulse peak power of 12kW have been obtained in the Q-switched mode with pulse durations of 25ns.
High power diffraction-limited 1064 nm fiber lasers operating in the nanosecond regime can be used for long-range LIDAR and micromachining applications. Peak power is limited by non-linearities, there is therefore an interest to develop fibers exhibiting a very large mode field effective area. New fibers are being developed in the frame of the 4F consortium ("French laser Fibers for Factories of the Future") to fulfill this need. We report on results obtained with a new 39 μm core diameter polarization maintaining ytterbium doped fiber that has been manufactured using the powder sintering technology. It features a large cladding absorption close to 20 dB/m at 976 nm (small signal) and a mode field diameter close to 32 μm. We built a pulsed MOPA. The preamplifier generates 2.5 ns pulses at 1064 nm with 8.5 W average power at 1 MHz pulse repetition frequency. The power amplifier is based on the 39 μm core fiber with 215/230μm hexagonal cladding counterpumped at 976 nm. It features 72 % slope efficiency delivering 72.2 W average power at a pulse repetition rate of 1 MHz. An end-cap was spliced to the fiber output to increase the damage threshold. At 100 kHz a peak power of 351 kW was measured for an average power of 59.9 W. The efficiency is then 70 %. We also studied the influence of the bending radius on the slope efficiency. We do not observe any slope efficiency reduction down to 25 cm bending diameter. It decreased to 68 % for the 20 cm bending diameter. The laser shows a quasisinglemode output beam with a good quality factor M2 of 1.2.
Fiber laser sources from visible to near-infrared wavelengths have driven innovative developments, impacting various domains such as telecommunications, biology, and medicine. The development of such fiber laser relies on the accurate knowledge of both optical properties as chromatic dispersion and material properties. On the other hand, quantum metrology is one of the promising field enabled by quantum technologies. It allows to get precise results compare to classical methods when measuring physical properties. A very common approach is to inject non classical states of light in interferometers to increase accuracy as well as sensitivity. Recently, this scheme has been used for detecting gravitational waves for example [1].
During the conference, we show how we take advantage of these capabilities to gather optical fiber photonic engineering with quantum optics. More specifically, we aim at presenting two quantum-based method for (i) high-accuracy (10-5) and dispersion-free measurement of refractive index difference and (ii) chromatic dispersion measurement based on the concept of quantum white-light interferometry that allows absolute measurement of chromatic dispersion with ~2.5 times improved accuracies compared to state-of-the-art realizations at telecom wavelengths.
[1] B. P. Abbott et. al., ”Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger”, Phys. Rev. Lett., 116, 061102 (2016)
Since the proof of concept of Photonic Crystal Fibers (PCF) by Knight et al., their development over the last two decades has led to progressive enlargement of core sizes while maintaining a transverse single-mode operation enabling power scaling in fiber lasers and amplifiers by pushing further the nonlinear effects and damage thresholds. Numerous fiber designs and laser/amplifier architectures have been investigated in order to make the most of the PCF technology and mainly to mitigate a new deleterious phenomenon responsible of beam quality degradation, the Transverse Mode Instability (TMI), which arose in parallel of the high average powers reached with those fibers. In this context, our research group has developed a PCF, so called Fully-Aperiodic Large-Pitch Fibers (FA-LPF) which proved its relevance with passive as well as active fibers, manufactured with the powder sintering technology known as REPUSIL. In this work, the refractive index of the FA-LPF core is slightly lower than that of the background cladding material (Δn ~ -5x10-5). This depressed-index core feature enables a thermal resilience ensuring an effective single-mode propagation above a certain average power for core size as high as 110µm. Experimental results in amplifier set-up with a 110 µm Yb-doped depressed core FA-LPF led to 110W of amplified signal for 300W of pump with a M² < 1.3. No TMI phenomenon was observed even at maximum pump power despite the average power and the very large mode area involved.
Recently, significant work has been conducted to reach high energy or peak power in fiber lasers. Microstructured fibers with large mode areas were developed to address this concern [1,2] and have allowed to access to the best state-of-the-art performances in terms of pulse energy, average power and peak power [3,4]. Although these fibers were designed for power scaling while keeping a single transverse mode propagation, the onset of transverse modal instabilities (TMI) degrades significantly the beam quality owing to the re-confinement of one or more higher order modes (HOMs) in the gain area. That effect suddenly appears when a certain average power threshold is exceeded. To push further the TMI power threshold, an original aperiodic pattern made of solid low-index inclusions embedded into the optical cladding was proposed to enhance the HOMs delocalization out of the gain region and thus ensure an effective single-mode emission. Such fibers are called Fully-Aperiodic Large-Pitch Fibers (FA-LPF). In this work, we realize for the first time a burn-in experiment with a 84 µm core Yb-doped FA-LPF in amplification regime. Using a 400 W pump diode at 976 nm and two different seeders, the power scaling as well as the spatial beam quality and its temporal behavior [5] were investigated in amplifier configuration in two different temporal regimes (nanosecond and picosecond pulses). After 800 hours, the maximum extracted average signal power decreases from 139W to 128W in picosecond regime and no TMI have been observed. Explanations on the power decrease will be given during the conference.
Supercontinuum (SC) sources offer very significant advantages for imaging and characterization of materials: full VIS-NIR spectrum availability, high spectral power density, reduced temporal coherence, among others. Certain applications require a very accurately customized emission spectrum, which in turn requires reliable tools to measure the dispersion spectra of the microstructured optical fiber of the SC source with very high spectral resolution and very short acquisition time. This measurement to be done ideally on the fly, while manufacturing the fiber, in order to fine tune the drawing variables to match the aimed dispersion profile in real time. In this work we present an interferometric method to measure chromatic dispersion using a pulsed FYLA SCT1000 supercontinuum. Very high-resolution dispersion measurement is obtained by optimization of the visibility of interferometric fringes, which is achieved by a fast synchronization of pulses overlapping.
FYLA SCT1000 Supercontinuum offers a very broadband emission with SPD close to 1 mW/nm, consisting of a train of white pulses of few ps timewidth, trigger output for synchronized measurements and very stable emission, with full spectrum average power stability < 0.5% and peak to peak stability < 1% in VIS region and < 0.6% in NIR region (stabilities refer to standard deviation over mean value). The sample to measure, which can be an optical fiber or any photonic device, is placed in one of the arms of a Michelson interferometer. Interferences obtained with different displacements give values of dispersion at different wavelengths. The standard way is to use a lamp or a SLED at each band [1,2]. This makes the measurement long and tedious. Lamps or SLEDs can be replaced by a single FYLA SCT1000 to obtain the dispersion curve in a fast and very robust way. Since the source is pulsed with a fixed rep rate, delay can be easily controlled to overlap properly light from arms of the interferometer. With a single source, the complete dispersion curve is obtained with resolution below 1 nm. In this work this synchronous interferometric method to measure dispersion is used to optimize the design and manufacture of microstructured optical fibers through an iterative protocol implemented in the fiber drawing process.
Yb-doped Photonic Crystal Fibers (PCFs) have triggered a significant power scaling into fiber-based lasers. However thermally-induced effects, like mode instability, can compromise the output beam quality. PCF design with improved Higher Order Mode (HOM) delocalization and effective thermal resilience can contain the problem. In particular, Fully- Aperiodic Large-Pitch Fibers (FA-LPFs) have shown interesting properties in terms of resilience to thermal effects. In this paper the performances of a Yb-doped FA-LPF amplifier are experimentally and numerically investigated. Modal properties and gain competition between Fundamental Mode (FM) and first HOM have been calculated, in presence of thermal effects. The main doped fiber characteristics have been derived by comparison between experimental and numerical results.
Over the last decade, significant work has been carried out in order to increase the energy/peak power provided by fiber lasers. Indeed, new microstructured fibers with large (or very large) mode area cores (LMA) such as Distributed Mode Filtering (DMF) fibers and Large-Pitch Fibers (LPF) have been developed to address this concern. These technologies have allowed diffraction-limited emission with core diameters higher than 80 μm, and have state-of-the-art performances in terms of pulse energy or peak power while keeping an excellent spatial beam quality. Although these fibers were designed to reach high power levels while maintaining a single transverse mode propagation, power scaling becomes quickly limited by the onset of transverse modal instabilities (TMI). This effect suddenly arises when a certain average power threshold is exceeded, drastically degrading the emitted beam quality. In this work, we investigate the influence of the core dimensions and the refractive index mismatch between the active core and the background cladding material, on the TMI power threshold in rod-type Fully-Aperiodic-LPF. This fiber structure was specifically designed to enhance the higher-order modes (HOMs) delocalization out of the gain region and thus push further the onset of modal instabilities. Using a 400W pump diode at 976 nm, the power scaling, as well as the spatial beam quality and its temporal behavior were investigated in laser configuration, which theoretically provides a lower TMI power threshold than the amplifier one due to the lack of selective excitation of the fundamental mode.
The power scaling of fiber lasers and amplifiers has triggered an extensive development of large-mode area fibers among which the most promising are the distributed mode filtering fibers and the large-pitch fibers. These structures enable for an effective higher-order modes delocalization and subsequently a singlemode emission. An interesting alternative consists in using the fully-aperiodic large-pitch fibers, into which the standard air-silica photonic crystal cladding is replaced by an aperiodic pattern made of solid low-index inclusions cladding. However, in such a structure, the core and the background cladding material surrounding it must have rigorously the same refractive index. Current synthesis processes and measurement techniques offer respectively a maximum resolution of 5×10-4 and 1×10-4 while the indexmatching must be as precise as 1×10-5 . Lately a gain material with a refractive index 1.5×10-4 higher than that of the background cladding material was fabricated, thus re-confining the first higher-order modes in the core. A numerical study is carried out on the benefit of bending such fully-aperiodic fiber to counteract this phenomenon. Optimized bending axis and radius have been determined. Experiments are done in a laser cavity operating at 1030 nm using an 88cm-long 51μm core diameter ytterbium-doped fiber. Results demonstrate an improvement of the M2 from 1.7 when the fiber is kept straight to 1.2 when it is bent with a 100 to 60 cm bend radius. These primary results are promising for future power scaling.
In this communication, the authors report on the first high peak-power emission obtained using a solid non-filamented core fully-aperiodic large pitch fiber manufactured by the REPUSIL method which is based on the sintering and vitrification of micrometric doped silica powders. Using a simple amplifier stage based on a 75 cm long piece of a fullyaperiodic large pitch fiber with a fiber core of 50 μm, an average output power of 95 W was achieved with an available pump power of 175 W, corresponding to an optical-to-optical efficiency of 54 %. The peak power reaches about 35 kW for pulse duration of 200 ps at a repetition rate of 13.5 MHz. A recent evolution of our set-up using a seeder delivering an average power of 4 W at 1 MHz with a pulse duration of 50 ps led to the emission of 71.4W in average power corresponding to a peak power of 1.42 MW. These results present the first demonstration of high average and high peak power in pulsed regime for these fibers.
Constant innovations of fiber technology over the last twenty years has fueled a huge improvement of the performances of fiber lasers. Further power scaling of fiber lasers is currently hindered by the phenomenon of transverse mode instabilities, a sudden deterioration of output beam quality occurring beyond a certain power threshold due to energy transfer from the fiber fundamental mode to high-order modes. Several studies have pinpointed a thermal origin for this phenomenon. A possible solution is to implement fiber designs capable of providing a robust single-mode operation even under severe heat load, in order to prevent such coupling. In this paper the effects on the propagating modes of the change of the inner cladding size and microstructuration in double-cladding photonic crystal fibers under heating condition are discussed, and related to field confinement and single-mode regime.
In this communication, the authors report on the first high power emission obtained using a solid non-filamented core fully-aperiodic large pitch fiber manufactured by the REPUSIL method which is based on the sintering and vitrification of micrometric doped silica powders. Using a simple laser cavity, an average output power of 252 W was achieved for the first time in such a fiber with an available pump power of 400 W, corresponding to an optical-to-optical efficiency of 63 %. The M2 measurements have shown an excellent beam quality with values close to 1.4 at full power and lower than 1.3 for signal power lower than 215 W.
In this paper, we investigate the potential of various large mode area fibers under thermal load, that is the state-of-the-art air-silica large pitch fibers, as well as the recently devised symmetry-reduced photonic crystal fiber and aperiodic all-solid by carefully considering the degrees of freedom offered all along the fiber fabrication. This work aims to discuss the mode filtering ability of these structures in regard to the power scaling and to confirm their potential for robust singlemode operation at high power level. Structural principles contributing to improve their performances such as the impact of air holes / solid inclusions size will be presented. We also intend to establish that the range of average absorbed/output power for which a robust singlemode operation is available can be shifted to fulfill user requests in term of power range.
This paper presents a study of original nanostructured optical fibers based on the SiO2-SnO2-(Yb3+) system. Two different processes have been developed and compared: the sol-gel chemical method associated to the “inverse dip-coating” (IDC) and the “powder in tube” (PIT). The microstructural and optical properties of the fibers are studied according to the concentration of SnO2. X-Ray Diffraction as well as Transmission Electron Microscopy studies show that the SnO2 crystallizes into the cassiterite phase as nanoparticles with a diameter ranging from 4 to 50 nm as a function of tin oxide concentration. A comparative study highlights a better conservation of SnO2 into the fiber core with the PIT approach according to the refractive index profile and energy dispersive X-Ray spectrometry measurement. The attenuation evaluated by the classic cut-back method gives respectively values higher than 3 dB/m and 0.2 dB/m in the visible (VIS) and infrared (IR) ranges for the PIT fibers whereas background losses reach 0.5 dB/m in the VIS range for IDC fibers. The introduction of ytterbium ions into the core of PIT fibers, directly in the first chemical step, leads to a laser emission (between 1050 and 1100 nm) according to the fiber length under 850 nm wavelength pumping. Luminescence studies have demonstrated the influence of the tin oxide on the rare earth optical properties especially by the modification of the absorption (850 to 1000 nm) and emission (950 to 1100 nm) by discretization of the bands, as well as on the IR emission lifetime evaluated to 10 μs.
We report in this communication on the investigation of novel triple-clad Very-Large-Mode-Area (VLMA) largepitch- fibers demonstrating numerically a strengthening of the fiber singlemodeness. The practical feasibility of the proposed fiber designs is ensured by taking into account the specifications of the resorted manufacturing technique. After a brief discussion about the mechanism of modal filtering into state-of-the-art air-silica leaky structures, we will present a novel kind of VLMA fibers. Here, the standard 6-fold symmetry as well as the periodic photonic crystal cladding are removed in profit to a totally aperiodic inner cladding microstructuration. This aperiodicity enables to exacerbate the singlemode robustness by maximizing the high-order-modes (HOMs) leakage out of the gain region in favour of the Gaussian fundamental mode. The behaviour of two different aperiodic LPFs is reported in regard to the refractive index of the inclusions, the doped core diameter and the operating wavelength. Thus, the scalability of these novel structures is evidenced. Finally, the manufacturability challenge is estimated by taking into account small index-mismatch between the active core and the background material.
We propose an in-depth investigation of all-solid microstructured optical fibers for the development of very large mode area (VLMA) fiber lasers. The inner cladding microstructure of these VLMA fibers is carefully optimized in order to get a robust single-mode laser operation in the high power regime. We describe the numerical approach used to devise a novel kind of fiber structures, the core of which should be larger than 50 μm while showing an improved single-mode emission compared to that of the state-of-the-art large pitch fibers. With the aim of overpassing the limitations of chemical vapor deposition techniques, we opted for a manufacturing process called Repusil, based on the sintering and vitrification of doped powders. Then, our opto-geometrical considerations result from the optical properties offered by this method and the use of the stack and draw. Finally, we present our very first fabrication for the proposed all-solid microstructured fibers in which a laser emission of 52 W in a continuous wave regime was obtained.
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