Microstructured Soft Glass Fibers for Advanced Fiber Lasers
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Microstructured Soft Glass Fibers for Advanced Fiber Lasers Axel Schulzgen1, Li Li1, Xiushan Zhu1, Shigeru Suzuki1, Valery L. Temyanko1, Jacques Albert2, and Nasser Peyghambarian1 1 College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, 1630 E. University Blvd., Tucson, AZ, 85750 2 Department of Electronics, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, K1S 5B6, Canada ABSTRACT Combining novel highly-doped phosphate glasses and advanced fiber drawing techniques, we fabricated and tested single-frequency fiber lasers that generate powers of more than 2 W. We demonstrate enhanced performance employing active photonic crystal fiber compared to more conventional devices that are based on large core step-index fiber. We also present results on phase-locking and coherently combining the output of up to 37 fiber cores into a single, near-Gaussian laser beam. To achieve exclusive oscillation of the fundamental in-phase supermode, several all-fiber laser cavities have been designed, numerically analyzed, fabricated, and tested. We will report on a 10 cm long monolithic all-fiber laser that emits more than 12 W of optical power and is based on combining the output of 19 active cores. All the cores are integrated within the same cladding and arranged in a two-dimensional isometric array. Our truly all-fiber approach that omits any free-space optical elements lead to a multi-emitter laser device that is free of optical alignment and robust against external perturbations.
INTRODUCTION Almost all commercial fiber lasers use rare earth doped silica optical fiber as the active material. Combined with fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) that provide the appropriate optical feedback at the emission wavelength monolithic, all-fiber lasers can be fabricated with low-loss fusion splices between the different silica fiber components. On the other hand, doped phosphate glasses appear to be the best active material for many bulk lasers. These glasses allow for extremely large doping levels with negligible clustering effects. Er/Yb co-doped phosphate glasses exhibit the additional advantage of having very high phonon energy and, consequently, a high energy-transfer efficiency from absorbing Yb ions to emitting Er ions. During recent years compact fiber lasers based on Er/Yb co-doped phosphate glass fiber have been demonstrated [14]. They can be forced into single-frequency operation [1, 4] for applications including LIDAR and coherent optical sensing but also made quite powerful with W-level output [2, 3] to fabricate building blocks for laser systems with scalable optical power. Several advances in phosphate fiber fabrication including microstructured fibers and photosensitive fibers have enabled recent progress in phosphate glass fiber laser devices. Here we will discuss two novel approaches to increase the active emission volume of compact phosphate glass based fiber lasers utilizing advanced drawing techniques to fabricate microstructured optical fiber (MOF). All phosphate MOFs have been drawn at the College of Optical Sciences
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