Abstract

In the field of rare-earth doped silica fiber applications there has been a growing interest in high-power CW and pulsed fiber lasers and amplifiers using Er³⁺, Yb³⁺, Nd³⁺ and Tm³⁺ ions as active dopants [1]–[8]. Fiber lasers are compact light sources providing high beam quality and power conversion efficiencies. Recent progress showed that fiber lasers can output CW-power levels in the kW range and pulse energies in the multiple-mJ range, making these optical sources an attractive alternative for a number of applications like material processing, medicine, lidar, and nonlinear frequency conversion. The power scaling of fiber lasers is a challenging task because of many limiting factors such as small core area, Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE), Brillouin, Raman and Rayleigh scattering, Kerr nonlinearities, and optical damaging. Many of these problems could be successfully solved using double cladding fibers with large core size (with or without mode selection) or with large mode area (LMA-fiber).

© 2006 Optical Society of America