Tandem pumping architecture enabled high power random fiber laser with near-diffraction-limited beam quality

Abstract

In this contribution, we present the tandem pumping avenue leveraged performance scaling of random fiber laser to record 3 kW level with inherent temporal stability and near-diffraction-limited beam quality. The high power system employs a four-stage master oscillator power amplifier chain. The master oscillator is a half-opened cavity structured random distributed feedback fiber laser centered at 1080 nm and pumped by incoherent amplified spontaneous emission source. Narrowband random laser seed is selected by employing a spectral filtering module with a maximum output power of 1.08 W, full width at half maximum linewidth of 0.47 nm and spectral optical-signal-to-noise ratio of about 42 dB. As to the main amplification stage, for given 104 W pre-amplified random laser seed and 3.61 kW pump laser, an ultimate output power of 3.03 kW can be obtained, corresponding to an optical-to-optical conversion efficiency of 81.05%. Nearly single-transverse-mode amplified random laser can be achieved even at full power level for inherent high thermal modal instability threshold enabled by tandem pumping and inducing bending loss for high-order transverse-mode. Further performance scaling of this high power random laser system, such as power boosting, operation wavelength tuning and linewidth alteration, is the next goal.