This paper presents all-fiber master oscillator-power amplifier systems that deliver high average power picosecond pulses with durations of 6 to 50ps, a tunable repetition rate within 360 kHz to 1 GHz range, and peak powers of up to 2 MW. The experimental investigations incorporate two Yb-doped spun tapered double-clad fibers gain modules with 60 μm and 92 μm core diameters. Utilizing the 92 μm core module picosecond pulses with high average power of 625 W average power at 20 MHz, and 645 W at 1 GHz were achieved. The gain module with 60 μm core diameter enabled to deliver a high peak power pulsed- signal with 2 MW peak power at 360 kHz and 50 ps pulse duration, while 26 MHz and 6 ps pulses reached 1 MW peak power. In all configurations, near-diffraction-limited beam quality, M² ⪅ 1.4, was maintained without any traces of Transverse Mode Instability (TMI). These compact, TMI-free, high-power amplifiers offer a promising platform for high-power ultrafast fiber lasers for the vast majority of industrial applications.
In the era of high-power laser systems, there is a constant demand for compact and efficient short-pulsed amplifiers delivering high power with an excellent beam profile and high polarization stability. In this presentation, I will review the advantages of active tapered double-clad fiber amplifier technology and different geometrical concepts. The special geometrical architecture of tapered fibers enables the direct amplification of picosecond pulses from tens of milliwatts to hundreds of watt levels in a single amplification stage. The recent technological progress in tapered fibers led to a doubling of the average power level, preserving excellent output spatial and polarization characteristics. The spun tapered fiber features low birefringence resulting in improved polarization stability at high power levels. Moreover, this geometrical architecture is exploited for the amplification of structured light, maintaining complex polarization profiles and spatial intensity distribution.
In this work, the full emission spectrum of Tm-doped fiber (1700 nm – 2000 nm) is employed for tunable noise-like pulse operation. By using an Acousto-Optic Tunable Filter (AOTF), the operation wavelength can be electrically tuned within the 300 nm wavelength range. Based on an all-anomalous dispersion cavity and hybrid mode-locking technique, noise-like pulse operations at different wavelengths are obtained with a 10-dB spectral width ranging from 22 nm to 37 nm and output average power from 25.9 mW to 104 mW. The cavity repetition is 35 MHz. Additionally, when the laser operates in the water absorption region, we observe giant pulses with intensity several times higher than average pulse intensity are generated in the output pulse train.
We demonstrate the dramatic progress in Yb-doped spun tapered double-clad fiber amplifiers delivering up to 550 W of average power with single mode spatial profile and 50 ps pulses at 20 MHz repetition rate. The special geometrical architecture of the fiber enables the direct amplification of short pulses from tens of mW to hundreds of watt levels in a single amplification stage, leading towards the realization of a compact and highly efficient picosecond fiber-based laser system with excellent output spatial and temporal characteristics.
This paper presents a first-ever experimental demonstration of coherent beam combining for optical vortexes with topological charges from one to five realized in a Yb-doped fiber short-pulsed laser system. The combing efficiency varies depending on the topological charge and beam pattern quality generated by the spatial light modulators. The maximum combining efficiency of 96.9% was achieved for the topological charge one. These results open a pathway to high-intensity optical vortexes with enormous potential applications in science and industry by utilizing advances in light-matter interactions.
We demonstrated a high accuracy prediction of the fiber laser output parameters by using a feed-forward neural network. We explored both the gain and spectral filter parameters to test the prediction performance of the neural network and realized the mapping between cavity parameters and laser output performance. We also investigated how the number of hidden layers could influence the accuracy of prediction. Based on the results, the output spectrum and temporal pulse profiles can be predicted with high accuracy in various fiber laser designs. Our work paves the way to intelligent laser design with ultimate autonomy.
We have demonstrated for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the successful direct amplification of a cylindrical-vector beams with axially symmetric polarization and doughnut-shaped intensity profile in picosecond MOPA system based on a double-clad ytterbium-doped spun tapered fiber with a ring-shaped active core. The output radially polarized beam with absolute contrast between bright and dark zones carries 10 ps pulses at 1030 nm with a 14.5 W average power level, 91 kW peak power and 0.97 μJ pulse energy.
In this work, we realized broadly tunable mode-locking operation from 1730 nm to 1815 nm in normal dispersion regime employing an acousto-optic tunable fiber (AOTF) in a Tm-doped dispersion-managed fiber laser. The AOTF worked as a multifunctional component in laser cavity suppressing undesired wavelength lasing and introducing a frequency shifting, which improved the stability of laser operation. The hybrid mode-locking incorporated by nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) effect and frequency shifting effect ensured self-starting stable pulsed operation. The pulse spectral widths ranged from 17 nm to 25 nm. The stretching-free direct amplification in two-cascaded fiber amplifier enabled power scaling up to 310 mW and pulse energy of 19 nJ. Pulse duration was compressed down to 282 fs by a pair of gratings. The seed laser is further optimized. The optimized seed laser enhances output power about 5 times. The laser system was designed for multiphoton imaging of bladder cancer in the third biological window to demonstrate the recently discovered nonlinear effect resulting in improvement of signal contrast at the deeper tissue level.
Soliton fiber lasers with passive harmonic mode-locking (HML) have been known for several decades as reliable sources of pulse trains with a high repetition rate. They are commonly employed as frequency comb generators in a wide list of applications in spectroscopy, telecommunications, microwave photonics. Besides that exhibiting advantageous consumer properties, such as compactness, reliability, low cost and convenience of beam delivery approach these sources are among the most attractive alternatives for material processing, medicine lasers and other areas. In the first group of these lasers the HML occurs due to special intra-cavity periodic filter with a free spectral range (FSR) which is a multiple of the main cavity FSR and equals to the pulse repetition rate. The second group of HML lasers in this classification is attractive for the scientific community due to the automatic arrangement of strongly periodic pulse pattern in the laser cavity through pulse repulsion. However, it is difficult to specify the mechanism of pulse repulsion for each case. It can be based on interaction through saturating and relaxing dissipative parameters, continuous-wave (CW) radiation component, dispersion waves, or acoustic waves induced by electrostriction, etc. A common feature of all interaction induced effects is low intensity, in many cases only slightly exceeding the noise level. The noise-induced fluctuations in the time interval of the HML pulse train are known as HML timing jitter, and its value is significantly higher than the timing jitter in lasers operating at fundamental frequency. It is a major drawback of the HML laser technology. We report the stabilizing frequency shift effect in harmonic mode-locking ring soliton fiber laser that is studied theoretically and numerically. We demonstrate that the frequency shift contributes to an increase in the hardness of interpulse interactions and can led to stabilization of the periodic arrangement of pulses. The experiment carried out confirms the theoretical predictions and the results of numerical simulation.
We present the results of compact and cost-efficient high-power and energy laser system based on a picosecond gain-switched DFB laser diode operating at a wavelength of 1064 nm with spectral linewidth less than 0.1 nm and pulse duration of 50 ps and tapered double clad fiber (T-DCF) amplifier. The unique properties of T-DCF as efficient amplification of low power seed signal and suppressed threshold of nonlinearities allow achievement of both high peak power of 170 kW and pulse energy of 9 μJ at pulse repetition rate of 10 MHz while maintaining spectrum linewidth as narrow as 0.1 nm. High average output power of 150 W was obtained with slightly broader laser linewidth. We also demonstrate second harmonic generation with over 30 W at 532 nm wavelength with conversion efficiency of 38%. These results make MOPA system based on gain-switched DFB laser diode and T-DCF amplifier an attractive source for material processing and sensing application including time resolved Raman spectroscopy.
Andrei Fedotov, Vasilii Ustimchik, Joona Rissanen, Teppo Noronen, Regina Gumenyuk, Yuri Chamorovskii, Alexander Kolosovskii, Victor Voloshin, Igor Vorob'ev, Valery Filippov
We developed ytterbium-doped double-clad large mode area (MFD = 30 μm) spun tapered fibers with low internal birefringence and perfect beam quality (M2 < 1.2). Picosecond MOPA system (95ps/100 MHz, 1064 nm) based on proposed active tapered fiber with output average power of 64 W (gain 32 dB) is demonstrated.
Fiber based Mamyshev regenerators provide potentially a low cost, pulse-on-demand source with pulse durations down to the hundred femtosecond scale. Based on nonlinear broadening of gain switched diode laser pulses in fiber and consequent pulse shaping methods, these sources could provide an alternative for mode-locked systems. Here we study numerically the properties of such sources in terms of input pulse duration and power as well as various fibers. We show that an optimum operating region can be found for each input parameter combination, that is limited mainly by the onset of spontaneous Raman scattering and optical wave breaking.
In this paper, we have developed Yb-doped fiber suitable for creation of all-fiber seed laser schemes operating near 977 nm. The fiber was based on a ring-doping design (cladding was partially doped with Yb-ions), which allowed us to fabricate a relatively small core and provide mode field diameter (MFD) of the active fiber comparable with standard fibers (to achieve small splicing losses with commercially available optical fibers) and, simultaneously, increase absorption from the cladding to keep a reasonably high lasing efficiency. So MFDx of the fiber was 12 μm, MFDy was 14 μm. Outer silica cladding of the active fiber was decreased to diameter of 80 μm and a special pump and signal combiner was used to inject pump and signal into the active fiber. Based on the developed Yb-doped fiber an all-fiber polarization maintaining mode-locked laser with central wavelength around 977 nm was demonstrated for the first time. SESAM was used as a saturable absorber. The laser was self-starting for pump powers above 4.6 W, with the output power of 3 mW. The autocorrelation was the best fitted with sech2 profile and pulse duration was estimated to be as long as 9.5 ps. The fundamental cavity frequency corresponded to the pulse repetition rate of 33.532 MHz. Signal-to-noise ratio measured in the radio frequency range was more than 50 dB, the line width was below 1 kHz, which indicate ultimate stability of the fabricated mode-lock laser.
We present a single-mode narrow band linear-polarized picosecond green fiber source delivered up to 146.4 kW of peak power. The laser architecture is composed of frequency-doubled all-fiber MOPA system operating at 1064 nm. The commercially available gain-switched semiconductor laser diode was used as a seed source delivered 77 ps pulses with the repetition rate between 100 kHz - 80 MHz. Two stages of pre-amplifiers based on the single-mode Yb-doped fibers were designed to amplify microwatt pulsed signal up to milliwatt level. A high-power amplification cascade comprised a double-clad polarization-maintaining tapered Yb3+-doped fiber as a gain medium. The frequency doubling was realized in a single-pass scheme with LBO crystal. The MOPA design with the active tapered fiber enabled to amplify effectively a narrowband picosecond IR radiation with relatively small spectral broadening. We obtained stable laser radiation with 77 ps pulses at repetition rate of 1 MHz, 290 pm spectral bandwidth with a central wavelength of 532 nm, the average power of 12 W corresponding to 12 μJ of pulse energy and 146.4 kW of peak power. The overall efficiency of secondharmonic generation reached 37 % in a single pass scheme. The obtained results showed advantages of the MOPA system based on a tapered amplifier in comparison with already published picosecond green laser systems exploited standard amplifiers based on cylindrical fixed-core fibers. The single-mode green laser with high peak power and narrow line are in high demand for a wide range of Raman spectroscopy applications.
We developed a highly efficient double-clad Yb-doped polarization-maintaining fiber to be implemented for small-signal amplification near 0.976 μm. The fiber was designed to have a relatively small mode field diameter compatible with standard step-index single-mode optical fibers. Another feature of the fiber was a small threshold for 0.976 μm signal amplification, which was achieved by a creation of a thin inner cladding (80 μm diameter). The unique design of the fiber allowed us to construct successfully an all-fiber picoseconds mode-locked laser at 0.98 μm for the first time to the best of our knowledge.
We demonstrated, for the first time to our best knowledge, an active tapered double clad fiber with circular birefringence and 35 μm core diameter. The output radiation had perfect beam quality (M2=1.18/1.1) and linearly polarized light with 15 dB of PER. The developed double clad active fiber was investigated for amplification of picosecond pulses in allfiber MOPA system. The MOPA system delivered 50 ps pulses with 55 W of the average power revealed 34.4 dB gain of the booster amplifier.
In the presented work, we investigated the optical and thermal stability of upconversion nanoparticles based on the three widely used matrices (NaYF4, Y2O3, LaF3). Analysis of the upconversion emission as a function of pump power density in a wide range revealed a multi-stage functional dependence. The stages of linear growing, saturation and degradation with both reversible and irreversible characters were discovered. For matrices of nanoparticles with low-temperature stability (NaYF4), the dependence proves to be irreversible that could cause by a change in the structure and chemical composition of the matrix. Reversible dependence occurs in matrices with high-temperature stability (Y2O3 and LaF3) and is caused by multiphonon nonradiative relaxation, which can be temperature-stimulated because of self-heating and low air-cooling of the crystal matrixes with low thermal conductivity.
A pure Ce-doped silica fiber is fabricated using modified chemical vapor deposition (MCVD) technique. Fluorescence characteristics of a Ce-doped silica fiber are experimentally investigated with continuous wave pumping from 440 nm to 405 nm. Best pump absorption and broad fluorescence spectrum is observed for ~ 405 nm laser. Next, the detailed analysis of spectral response as a function of pump power and fiber length is performed. It is observed that a -10dB spectral width of ~ 280 mn can be easily achieved with different combinations of the fiber length and pump power. Lastly, we present, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, a broadband fluorescence spectrum with -10dB spectral width of 301 nm, spanning from ~ 517.36 nm to ~ 818 nm, from such fibers with non-UV pump lasers.
Generation of ultrashort pulses with high average power and moderately high pulse energy generally requires a modelocked laser followed by several fiber amplifiers in a master-oscillator power-amplifier configuration. Recently, gainswitched diode lasers have emerged as a viable replacement to mode-locked oscillators as sources of sub-100 ps pulses in these systems, but the low output power available from the diodes necessitates the use of multiple costly amplifier stages. Here, we demonstrate the generation of 1.7 μJ pulses at 1030 nm, and 11.7 μJ pulses at 1064 nm from a gain-switched diode seeded compact MOPA with only two amplification stages. The final stage is a tapered fiber amplifier, whose geometry efficiently suppresses amplified spontaneous emission and allows reaching a gain of ~40 dB. This research work is still in progress, and further increase in pulse energy should be possible by optimizing the setup.
We demonstrates all-fiber master oscillator – power amplifier delivered 70W output power at 1033.33nm with 8 kHz FWHM linewidth without any problems with SBS. The anisotropic ytterbium doped tapered double clad amplifier with 50 μm MFD and polarization extinction ratio about 30 dB is developed as a burst stage. The output radiation demonstrated perfect beam quality (M2=1.03/1.08).
The powerful picosecond master oscillator – power amplifier (MOPA) with double clad ytterbium doped tapered fiber as a buster amplifier has been demonstrated in the presented paper. The developed MOPA has 60ps pulses with 0.3mJ pulse energy and 5MW peak power.
We present a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) system that comprises a mode-locked semiconductor disk laser (SDL) emitting at 1.33 μm and a bismuth-doped fiber amplifier. The mode-locked SDL was fabricated by wafer bonding an InP-based gain section with a GaAs-based distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) using (3-Mercaptopropyl)-trimethoxysilane. The bismuth-doped fiber amplifier was pumped with a continuous wave SDL emitting at 1.18 μm. The MOPA system produced pulses at a repetition rate of 827 MHz with a pulse energy of 0.62 nJ, which corresponds to an average output power of more than 0.5 W.
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