Influence of core NA on thermal-induced mode instabilities in high power fiber amplifiers

Abstract

We report on the influence of core NA on thermal-induced mode instabilities (MI) in high power fiber amplifiers. The influence of core NA and the V-parameter on MI has been investigated numerically. It shows that core NA has a larger influence on MI for fibers with a smaller core-cladding-ratio, and the influence of core NA on the threshold is more obvious when the amplifiers are pumped at 915 nm. The dependence of the threshold on the V-parameter revealed that the threshold increases linearly as the V-parameter decreases when the V-parameter is larger than 3.5, and the threshold shows an exponential increase as the V-parameter decreases when the V-parameter is less than 3.5. We also discussed the effect of linewidth on MI, which indicates that the influence of linewidth can be neglected for a linewidth smaller than 1 nm when the fiber core NA is smaller than 0.07 and the fiber length is shorter than 20 m. Fiber amplifiers with different core NA were experimentally analyzed, which agreed with the theoretical predictions.