Abstract

Broadly tunable fiber laser system has been demonstrated at room temperature. The IR fiber laser system consists of two high peak power individual pulse fiber lasers and their difference frequency generation (DFG) in Periodically Poled Lithium Niobate (PPLN) nonlinear optical crystal. Both lasers were operating at 20 kHz Pulse Repetition Rate and 200 ns pulse duration with diffraction limited beam quality. The first laser is a CW, < 16 GHz spectral bandwidth, tunable in 1050-1081 nm spectral range and Acousto- Optically extra cavity amplitude modulated Yb fiber laser ring oscillator - high power two stage amplifier which produced 280 mW of average and 70W of Peak power, respectively. The second laser is a DFB CW, single 1556 nm wavelength, < 1MHz spectral bandwidth and extra cavity amplitude modulated Er fiber laser oscillator - high power single stage amplifier with 160 mW of output average power and 40W of peak power. Synchronized pulses from two fiber lasers have been combined and fiber coupled into a single polarization maintained fiber using a fiber WDM combiner and then fibercoupled into the NovaWave Technologies, commercial DFG laser module which employed 50 mm PPLN crystal. The DFG stage of the system produced tunable radiation in 3236.4-3545.4 nm spectral range (309 nm). The difference frequency generation has a 9 mW average power, 20 kHz pulse repetition rate and 200 ns pulse duration which corresponds to 2.25 W of peak power. The demonstrated pulse DFG conversion efficiency is 0.2 W/W2 (20%/W) which is ~ 100 times higher than that of CW operation. Further scaling of IR laser power was limited by optical damage of PPLN crystal and fiber lasers combining optics. Using a PPLN-MgO crystal and additional fiber laser amplifier stages based on Large Mode Area gain fibers is expected to allow us to achieve damage free difference frequency generation with up-to 100 mW of average power and peak power of up to 25 W.

Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call