Yb3+doped ribbon fiber for high-average power lasers and amplifiers

Abstract

Diffraction-limited high power lasers in the region of 10s of kW to greater than 100 kW are needed for defense, manufacturing and future science applications. A balance of thermal lensing and Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) for narrowband amplifiers and Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) for broadband amplifiers is likely to limit the average power of circular core fiber amplifiers to 2 kW (narrowband) or 36 kW (broadband). A ribbon fiber, which has a rectangular core, operating in a high order mode can overcome these obstacles by increasing mode area without becoming thermal lens limited and without the on-axis intensity peak associated with circular high order modes. High order ribbon fiber modes can also be converted to a fundamental Gaussian mode with high efficiency for applications in which this is necessary. We present an Yb-doped, air clad, optical fiber having an elongated, ribbon-like core having an effective mode area of area of 600 μm² and an aspect ratio of 13:1. As an amplifier, the fiber produced 50% slope efficiency and a seed-limited power of 10.5 W, a gain of 24 dB. As an oscillator, the fiber produced multimode power above 40 W with 71% slope efficiency and single mode power above 5 W with 44% slope efficiency. The multimode M2 beam quality factor of the fiber was 1.6 in the narrow dimension and 15 in the wide dimension.