Sandia National Laboratories' program in high-power fiber lasers has emphasized development of enabling technologies
for power scaling and gaining a quantitative understanding of fundamental limits, particularly for high-peak-power,
pulsed fiber sources. This paper provides an overview of the program, which includes: (1) power scaling of diffraction-limited
fiber amplifiers by bend-loss-induced mode filtering to produce >1 MW peak power and >1 mJ pulse energy
with a practical system architecture; (2) demonstration of a widely tunable repetition rate (7.1-27 kHz) while
maintaining constant pulse duration and pulse energy, linear output polarization, diffraction-limited beam quality, and
<1% pulse-energy fluctuations; (3) development of microlaser seed sources optimized for efficient energy extraction; (4)
high-fidelity, three-dimensional, time-dependent modeling of fiber amplifiers, including nonlinear processes; (5)
quantitative assessment of the limiting effects of four-wave mixing and self-focusing on fiber-amplifier performance; (6)
nonlinear frequency conversion to efficiently generate mid-infrared through deep-ultraviolet radiation; (7) direct diode-bar
pumping of a fiber laser using embedded-mirror side pumping, which provides 2.0x higher efficiency and much
more compact packaging than traditional approaches employing formatted, fiber-coupled diode bars; and (8)
fundamental studies of materials properties, including optical damage, photodarkening, and gamma-radiation-induced
darkening.
The paper presents the results concerning with beam quality improvement by concurrently modifying the index and the doping profile in LMA fibers. Further, the mode effective area is maximized by providing a passive ring in the cladding. The influence of the index profile over the distribution of the optical power among various modes is presented. The aim is to favor the fundamental mode by concurrently rejecting the higher modes, i.e. generating a quality beam. Simulation results and manufacturer's tests led to a novel design which consists in providing a passive ring in the cladding. That was of great help in rejecting the higher-order modes, and it can be applied to a large range of LMA fibers. The cladding ring procedure is of interest for Liekki, and it is very likely that it would be put into production.
KEYWORDS: Doping, Ytterbium, Erbium, Optical simulations, Manufacturing, Beam shaping, Refractive index, High power fiber lasers, Photonic crystal fibers, Control systems
Many high power fiber laser applications require doped fibers having large mode area but still working in the single mode regime. The most common techniques to keep a large mode area fiber in the single mode regime are to reduce the core numerical aperture, to strip the high order modes by coiling the fiber, to launch only a single transverse mode, or to use photonic crystal fibers. All these methods have limits and disadvantages.
In this paper we demonstrate by simulation the effectiveness of another method to suppress the high order modes in large mode area active fibers by optimizing the rare earth dopant concentration across the core while keeping the step index structure of the core of the fiber. This method was not previously employed because the traditional doped fiber manufacturing technologies do not have the required capability to radially control the dopant concentration. However, Direct Nanoparticle Deposition (DND) can be used to manufacture large mode area fibers having any radial distribution of active element concentration and any refractive index profile. Thus, DND fibers can be designed to benefit from this high order mode suppression technique.
The simulation results presented in this paper have been obtained using Liekki Application Designer v3.1, a software simulator for fiber lasers and amplifiers.
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