High-power Fiber Research Articles

A 3.2 kW Single Stage Narrow Linewidth Fiber Amplifier Emitting at 1050 nm.

In this paper, we have demonstrated a narrow linewidth high power fiber laser emitting at a short wavelength of ~1050 nm. The fiber laser is based on a structure of master oscillator power amplification (MOPA) with an optimized fiber Bragg-grating-based laser cavity as the seed. Both stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) effects have been effectively suppressed by using a long passive fiber between the seed and the amplifier. Based on the fiber amplifier, we have ultimately boosted the narrow linewidth laser from ~40 W to 3.2 kW with a slope efficiency of 85.1% and a 3-dB linewidth of ~0.1 nm. The SRS suppression ratio of the laser is ~29.7 dB at maximum power. Due to our fiber mode control strategies, the beam quality always stays near-diffraction-limited while amplifying, and the measured M2 factor is ~1.4 at the maximum power. Further increase in output power is limited by the SBS effect.

High power and small spot fiber coupling system for pump sources based on symmetric stepped prisms

High power and small spot fiber coupling system for pump sources based on symmetric stepped prisms

Low Threshold and High Power Fiber Laser Passively Mode-Locked Based on PbSe Quantum Dots

Low Threshold and High Power Fiber Laser Passively Mode-Locked Based on PbSe Quantum Dots

Simplified expression for transverse mode instability threshold in high power fiber lasers.

In this work, we propose an analytical expression for calculating the transverse mode instability (TMI) threshold power, which clearly shows the role of various fiber parameters and system parameters. The TMI threshold expression is obtained by solving the heat conduction equation and the nonlinear coupling equation using the fundamental mode fitted by Gaussian functions. The calculation results of the proposed TMI threshold expression are consistent with the experimental phenomena and simulation results from the well-recognized theoretical model. The influence of some special parameters on the TMI threshold and the power scaling is also investigated. This work will be helpful for fiber design and TMI mitigation of high-power fiber lasers.

Novel Bidirectional Output Ytterbium-Doped High Power Fiber Lasers: From Continuous to Quasi-Continuous.

Traditional ytterbium-doped high-power fiber lasers generally use a unidirectional output structure. To reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of the fiber laser, we propose a bidirectional output fiber laser (BOFL). The BOFL has many advantages over that of the traditional unidirectional output fiber laser (UOFL) and has a wide application in the industrial field. In theory, the model of the BOFL is established, and a comparison of the nonlinear effect in the traditional UOFL and the BOFL is studied. Experimentally, high-power continuous wave (CW) and quasi-continuous wave (QCW) BOFLs are demonstrated. In the continuous laser, we first combine the BOFL with the oscillating amplifying integrated structure, and a near-single-mode bidirectional 2 × 4 kW output with a total power of above 8 kW is demonstrated. Then, with the simple BOFL, a CW bidirectional 2 × 5 kW output with a total power of above 10 kW is demonstrated. By means of pump source modulation, a QCW BOFL is developed, and the output of a near-single mode QCW laser with a peak output of 2 × 4.5 kW with a total peak power of more than 9 kW is realized. Both CW and QCW output BOFL are the highest powers reported at present.

High power tunable Raman fiber laser at 1.2 μm waveband

Development of a high power fiber laser at special waveband, which is difficult to achieve by conventional rare-earth-doped fibers, is a significant challenge. One of the most common methods for achieving lasing at special wavelength is Raman conversion. Phosphorus-doped fiber (PDF), due to the phosphorus-related large frequency shift Raman peak at 40 THz, is a great choice for large frequency shift Raman conversion. Here, by adopting 150 m large mode area triple-clad PDF as Raman gain medium, and a novel wavelength-selective feedback mechanism to suppress the silica-related Raman emission, we build a high power cladding-pumped Raman fiber laser at 1.2 μm waveband. A Raman signal with power up to 735.8 W at 1252.7 nm is obtained. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest output power ever reported for fiber lasers at 1.2 μm waveband. Moreover, by tuning the wavelength of the pump source, a tunable Raman output of more than 450 W over a wavelength range of 1240.6–1252.7 nm is demonstrated. This work proves PDF’s advantage in high power large frequency shift Raman conversion with a cladding pump scheme, thus providing a good solution for a high power laser source at special waveband.Graphical

Understanding factors affecting the process efficiency, quality and carbon emission in laser drilling of CFRP composite via tailored sequence multiple-ring scanning

Carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) is increasingly being used in the aerospace, marine, and land transport due to its lightweight, corrosion resistance, and high strength. However, hole drilling during assembly remains challenging due to extensive tool wear and delamination. Laser processing, typically used for drilling and machining, often produces heat effects or is low in efficiency if ultrashort pulse lasers are used. Here, we report an optimised result for a tailored sequence multiple-ring scanning laser drilling method that significantly improves the process efficiency (up to 800 %) by using a continuous wave high power fibre laser operating in pulse mode. Factors such as ring numbers, ring spacing (hatch distance), laser power, and pulse frequency are investigated using statistical design of experiments, and their interactions and effects on process efficiency, carbon emissions, heat-affected zone size, and hole taper are evaluated. The work shows that process efficiency can be significantly increased as the number of rings increases. This is counter-intuitive and would be useful for industrial applications. Using nitrogen as the assist gas results in significantly lower unit process carbon emissions than using argon. The mechanisms behind this efficiency improvement are discussed.

The effect of in-source spatial beam shaping on the laser welding of e-mobility metals and alloys

Electromobility applications require several welded connections using demanding materials often in dissimilar combinations. Copper, aluminium, or steel alloys are laser welded for energy storage and traction related components. On the one hand, high power fiber laser sources provide in-source beam shaping solutions able to modify the irradiance profile towards ring-shaped beams. On the other hand, research focused on the effect of the beam shapes on the melting mechanisms and process quality is still in progress. This work studies the effect of different beam profiles on AISI301LN, AA6082 and pure Cu with a 5 kW fiber laser. Linear trends of power over penetration depth as a function of speed confirms the validity of employing the lumped heat capacity model for ring-shaped beams. Moreover, the specific melting fluence is observed to exhibit an exponential decaying trend with the proportion of power allocated in the fiber core, irrespective of tested material.

Laser cutting studies on 10–60 mm thick stainless steels with a short focus head for nuclear decommissioning

The cutting studies conducted on stainless steel plates with thicknesses of 10–60 mm using a short focus head and a high power fiber laser to evaluate application to nuclear decommissioning. The cutting performance was evaluated by determining the maximum cutting speed for each plate thickness and laser power. Both constant speed cutting and two-step speed cutting were experimentally performed. For a thickness of 10 mm, constant speed cutting had the better performance. On the other hand, two-step speed cutting achieved faster cutting for thicknesses greater than 10 mm. Even with a short focus head, cuts up to a thickness of 60 mm were achieved with a laser power of 6 kW, which corresponds to a cutting capability of ∼10 mm/kW. Kerf widths, which indicate the amount of secondary waste, were also measured in addition to maximum cutting speeds. Although there were some differences according to cutting conditions, all the kerf widths were narrow, within 2 mm.

Origin of SRS-induced beam quality distortion under TMI threshold.

In high power fiber lasers, the degradation of beam quality caused by Raman effect has attracted more and more attention in recent years, but its physical mechanism is still unclear. We're going to differentiate between heat effect and nonlinear effect by duty cycle operation. The evolution of beam quality at different pump duty cycles has been studied based on a quasi-continuous wave (QCW) fiber laser. It is found that even if the Stokes intensity is only -6 dB (energy proportion: 26%) lower than that of the signal light intensity, the beam quality has no obvious change with the duty cycle of 5%; on the contrary, when the duty cycle gradually approaches 100% (CW-pumped scheme), the beam quality distortion changes faster and faster with the increase of Stokes intensity. The experimental results are contrary to core-pumped Raman effect theory [IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett.34, 215 (2022)10.1109/LPT.2022.3148999], and further analysis confirms that the heat accumulation in the process of Stokes frequency shift should be responsible for this phenomenon. That is the first time, to the best of our knowledge, for intuitive reveal of the origin of stimulated Raman scattering (SRS)-induced beam quality distortion under transverse mode instability (TMI) threshold in an experiment.

Optimized segmented cladding fiber for extreme large mode area using latin hypercube sampling

In this paper a new design of octo-wing segmented cladding fiber (SCF) with a uniform core containing a ring and a non-uniform double cladding was proposed and optimized. The Latin hypercube sampling was applied to generate design cases as the input values for estimation of the objective functions as the output variables. Three physical parameters of the core assisted ring: thickness, radius, and refractive index difference were selected as the design variables. Twenty different design cases were numerically simulated by finite element method. To optimize the effective mode area (EMA) as the objective function, response surface methodology was applied. The fiber offers the single mode operation with a confinement loss ratio of over 100 between the fundamental mode (FM) and the higher order mode (HOM). Operating at the wavelength of 1.550μm, the EMA is significantly enlarged to about 884μm2. We have investigated the properties of the proposed optimized ring assisted SCF (RA-SCF) in terms of confinement losses of FM and first HOM considering a perfect matched layer. The proposed RA-SCF provides the potential applications in compact high power fiber lasers.

Fabrication and characterization of tapered photonic crystal fiber for broadband 2 µm: four-wave mixing-based fibered OPCPA

We present the simulation, fabrication, and characterization of large area microstructured fiber tapers which enables broadband phasematching conditions of the four wave-mixing process. These silica-based tapers are intended to serve as a nonlinear gain medium for intense and high average power Fiber Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplifier emitting at 2 upmu hbox {m} and strongly pumped at Yb wavelength. Different geometries (tapered/untapered, aspect ratio, etc.) are fabricated, analyzed and their broadening properties—key for supporting ultrashort pulses amplification—are compared and discussed. The characterization of nonlinear gain bandwidth of the tapers relies on a tunable source of stochastic pulses based on tunable amplified spontaneous emission in Yb-doped amplifiers. The strong overshoots of this source allows degenerate four-wave mixing process to occur thus generating broadband incoherent visible signal and mid-infrared idler waves at much lower average power than usually needed with coherent pumping. The idler centered around 1.85 mum is broadened due to zero-dispersion wavelength shift along the taper.

Femtosecond laser fabrication of large-core fiber Bragg gratings for high-power fiber oscillators

In this paper, a fs-laser phase mask inscription system based on a galvanometer scanning strategy is designed and set up for the fabrication of large-core fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs). Based on this setup, a homogeneous cross-sectional refractive index modulation can be achieved in the core of a large-mode-area fiber, and a pair of FBGs are fabricated in fibers with a core diameter of 30 µm. To investigate the performance of the fabricated FBGs, a high power all-fiber oscillator is built using a pure backward pumping structure. The FBGs work well, and the maximum output power of 7920 W is achieved with an optical–optical conversion efficiency of 77.3%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest power of all-fiber oscillators based on fs-written FBGs. This work provides a flexible, stable, and economic scanning strategy for large-core FBG inscription and exhibits excellent performance for high power fiber lasers.

M2 factor for evaluating fiber lasers from large mode area few-mode fibers

Evaluating the laser quality accurately is one of the most important and fundamental physical issues for laser sources, and the beam quality of lasers from the large mode area few-mode fibers have been haunted by the presence of high order mode for many years. This paper presents a modification to the M2 factor, which can be used to evaluate the mode content of fiber lasers accurately and efficiently, no matter whether the fiber modes are superposited coherently or incoherently. By mathematical derivation, the origin of the influence of relative phase on the M2 factor has been determined mathematically. A modification to the second moment of the beam intensity profile has been proposed, which eliminates the impact of uncontrollable relative phase on the second moment, and subsequently restores the one-to-one mapping between mode content and M2 factor even for coherent superposition cases. Also presented are the results of numerical simulations, which support the validity of the modified M2 factor to evaluate the mode content of the high power fiber lasers. With modified M2 factor being less than 1.1, the power fraction of LP11 mode content is unique and determined to be less than 3%.

Experimental study of chemical-etched high-power cladding mode stripping device toward high attenuation

Fiber cladding mode stripping device with high-power high-attenuation stripping capability and negligible perturbation to signal light has been developed by employing Teflon-capillary segmental-etching fabrication method. By using different etchant solutions, surface roughening and cladding reducing structures can be obtained. The influence of the roughened length on the attenuation of cladding power has been studied experimentally, showing that roughened surface strips cladding light well at length below 5 cm, but becomes less effective beyond that. The impact of the cladding reduction has also been investigated, indicating that reduced cladding can help deplete the cladding light effectively, and the attenuation is able to be improved from 23.0 dB to 43.2 dB by etching the cladding diameter from 400 μm to 50 μm. By combining the roughened surface and reduced cladding structures, cladding mode stripper with 7 °C/kW of temperature rising rate on the etched area has been made, and stripped power up to 2.1 kW at 39 dB of attenuation has been demonstrated, with the device length merely 16 cm. The maximum temperature on the device housing at full operation power for the case water flux being 3.1 L/min and 5.6 L/min is 67 °C and 50 °C, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of >2-kW power cladding mode stripping device with 39-dB attenuation. All results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed fabrication technique to make cladding mode stripping device for high power and superior beam quality fiber laser systems.

Over 10-kW fiber laser spectral beam combination based on dichromatic mirrors

Owing to the advantages of good beam quality, high conversion efficiency, convenient thermal management and compact structure, high power fiber lasers have been widely desired in industrial processing. So far, the output power has been strictly limited by the nonlinear effects and transverse mode instability. In order to break through the power limitation, here we experimentally demonstrate a power boosting technology called spectral beam combination based on dichromatic mirrors. Firstly, high power fiber amplifiers with different central wavelengths are established for the spectral combination. Secondly, utilizing a dual-beam combined system and two homemade high power fiber amplifiers, an output power of 10 kW is achieved, with a remarkable combination efficiency of 98.3% and a beam quality of <i>M</i> <sup>2</sup>～1.33. Secondly, using a three-beam combined system, an output power of 13.5 kW is obtained with a combination efficiency of 96.8% and beam quality of <i>M</i> <sup>2</sup>～1.61. By increasing the number of input beams and their output power as well, we believe that a higher output power can be achieved based on dichromatic mirror spectral beam combination.

Review of High Average Power and High Beam Quality LD-Pumped Ytterbium-Doped Fiber Laser Oscillators and Amplifiers

Review of High Average Power and High Beam Quality LD-Pumped Ytterbium-Doped Fiber Laser Oscillators and Amplifiers

Double-ended output near-single-mode quasi-continuous wave monolithic fiber laser

Quasi-continuous fiber lasers have a broad application prospect in the industrial field. However, in the current research on quasi-continuous wave (QCW) fiber lasers only the single-ended output structure is used. A double-ended output fiber laser oscillator needs only one resonator to realize two laser outputs. Compared with single-ended output laser, it has a low cost, small volume and high work efficiency. It is expected to achieve higher power laser output through double-ended output beam combining. Therefore, the double-ended output QCW fiber laser is proposed and studied in this paper. The steady-state rate equation establishes a theoretical model of a QCW fiber laser oscillator with two ends, considering the stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) and amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). The output power, time domain and nonlinear effects of this type of laser are simulated. The results show that the overshoot effect caused by relaxation oscillation will produce a large amount of thermal deposition and ultra-high peak power in the fiber. It will reduce the nonlinear threshold and limit the increase of power of the QCW fiber laser. Prolonging the rise time of the pump can effectively suppress the relaxation oscillation and obtain a stable pulse output during the pulse duration. In addition, compared with the single-ended QCW laser, the double-ended output structure changes the energy distribution in the fiber and reduces the accumulation of nonlinear effects in the gain fiber, thus inhibiting SRS. Then, the ytterbium-doped fiber with a core/cladding diameter of 20/400 μm is used to achieve the first double-ended QCW laser output with a peak power of 3 kW. The peak power values at both ends are 1218 and 2220 W, respectively. The values of corresponding beam quality factor <i>M</i><sup>2</sup> are 1.34 and 1.27. The optical-to-optical conversion efficiency is about 60%. The pulse width is 100 μs, and the repetition frequency is 1 kHz. This research verifies the feasibility of high power and high beam quality output by double-ended output QCW fiber laser, which provides support for small volume, low cost, high power and high brightness QCW fiber laser. Further breakthroughs in the research and application of high-power fiber lasers are expected to be made by continually optimizing experiments, increasing pump power, and improving the laser’s output power and conversion efficiency.

Review on the discipline of high power fiber laser in China

Review on the discipline of high power fiber laser in China

Theoretical model and numerical study of effect of target reflected light on high-power fiber laser

<sec>In a high-power fiber laser system, the reflected light generated when the laser hits the target may be recoupled to the laser and amplified by the laser, thereby damaging the laser system. This situation is particularly serious for a high-power laser system, such as spectral beam combining a high power fiber laser, which lacks effective light-return protection. In order to solve the above problems, it is necessary to integrate various physical effects in the whole system link, evaluate and analyze the influence of reflected light on the operating state of the system, so as to optimize the optical path layout and system structure in the beginning of the design of fiber laser to avoid unnecessary losses. Based on the atmospheric transmission theory, fiber rate equation and medium heat conduction equation model, the effect of reflected light on high-power fiber laser is analyzed. In this paper is conducted the numerical simulation of coupling efficiency of reflected light of high-power fiber laser. It is found that under certain atmospheric conditions, the reflected power is related to the transmission distance, the offset angle of optical axis, divergence angle, and the offset of center position of the beam, and will affect the output power, beam quality factor, thermal effect and the signal-to-noise ratio of the stimulated Raman scattering spectrum of the fiber laser. The coupling efficiency of reflected light has a maximum value at a certain transmission distance. For example, the reflected light power up to 140 W is obtained when the transmission distance is 1500 m, which will largely affect the laser system. The reflected power is affected by the offset angle of optical axis far less than by the transmission distance when transmission increases from 500 m to 2000 m. For example, a change of less than 0.1 W can be obtained when offset angle increases from 0.11° to 0.44°. It is also shown that as the divergence angle changes from 0 to 15<i>''</i>, the coupling power decays nearly exponentially with the divergence angle. The coupling efficiency is close to 1% near 12<i>''</i>, which is almost negligible. The output beam quality of the laser system is also affected by the beam quality of reflected light. Deterioration of the beam quality of reflected light will lead to the deterioration of the laser output beam quality. As the reflected light power enters the fiber laser system and increases, the forward output power will decrease and the backward signal power will increase, and the Raman power will increase rapidly near the fiber output end. When the reflected light is present, the thermal effects caused by selecting the gain fiber with different pump absorption coefficients are very important. The stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) rejection ratio decreases with the increase of pump absorption coefficient. For example, the SRS rejection ratio decreases by 5 dB when pump absorption coefficient increases from 1.5 dB/m to 4.5 dB/m, resulting in a decrease in the signal-to-noise ratio of the laser, which will reduce the reliability of the fiber laser system.</sec><sec>In the design and test of spectral beam combining systems for high-power fiber lasers, the attention should be paid to the reflected light in the entire process, which includes the outer optical path and the internal optical path of the laser. The comprehensive constraints of multiple key indicators are analyzed, and the probability of system damage or reliability degradation due to reflected light is evaluated. The research results of this paper are of certain guiding significance in selecting suitable outer optical path layout and system parameters and also in optimizing the design of high energy fiber laser system.</sec>