Comparative study on transverse mode instability of fiber amplifiers based on long tapered fiber and conventional uniform fiber

Abstract

Compared with conventional uniform fibers, long tapered fibers provide an effective way to maintain beam quality and suppress the generation of nonlinear effects in fiber lasers. In this work, the transverse mode instability (TMI) of two amplifiers based on ytterbium-doped fiber (YDF) with uniform core diameter and tapered core diameter has been investigated experimentally. For a reasonable comparison of TMI in these two fiber amplifiers, the same effective core diameters and design parameters are applied to both. In the uniform YDF amplifier, the TMI threshold is around 1046 W, and the beam quality M2 factor increases with the power and reaches 3.2 when the power is around 1500 W. In a tapered YDF (T-YDF) amplifier, the maximum output power is up to 2170 W with a beam quality of M2 ~ 2.2 and no sign of TMI is observed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported all-fiber tapered fiber laser with a 2 kW-level average output power. The experimental results and theoretical analysis indicate that the TMI threshold of the T-YDF amplifier is higher than the uniform YDF amplifier in spite of sharing the same effective core diameter.