TY - JOUR
T1 - Efficient and scalable side pumping scheme for short high-power optical fiber lasers and amplifiers
AU - Polynkin, Pavel
AU - Temyanko, Valery
AU - Mansuripur, Masud
AU - Peyghambarian, N.
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received February 5, 2004; revised May 4, 2004. This work was supported by AFOSR under Contract F49620-03-1-0194. The authors are with the Optical Sciences Center, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721 USA (e-mail: ppolynkin@optics.arizona.edu). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2004.831977 Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the contact side-pumping scheme. The lower figure shows the cross section of the assembly.
PY - 2004/9
Y1 - 2004/9
N2 - A new and simple method of pumping short high-power optical fiber lasers and amplifiers is described. In our approach, several passive coreless optical fibers are brought into direct contact alongside a single rare-earth doped active fiber which constitutes the active medium of the laser (amplifier). Pump light is delivered through the passive coreless fibers and penetrates into the active fiber via evanescent field coupling. To enhance the pump absorption in the gain medium, high-order spatial modes are excited in the pump delivery fibers, and an active fiber with high concentration of the dopant ions is used. As a demonstration of the viability of our approach, test results are reported on a 12-cm-long Er+3-Yb+3 codoped phosphate glass fiber laser. The laser output reaches 5 W using 23-W pumping into six coreless fibers. Above threshold, the laser has ∼24% optical-to-optical conversion efficiency (with ∼64% being the theoretical maximum). The linearity of the input-output characteristic for the laser suggests that the output power can be scaled up by applying higher pump power.
AB - A new and simple method of pumping short high-power optical fiber lasers and amplifiers is described. In our approach, several passive coreless optical fibers are brought into direct contact alongside a single rare-earth doped active fiber which constitutes the active medium of the laser (amplifier). Pump light is delivered through the passive coreless fibers and penetrates into the active fiber via evanescent field coupling. To enhance the pump absorption in the gain medium, high-order spatial modes are excited in the pump delivery fibers, and an active fiber with high concentration of the dopant ions is used. As a demonstration of the viability of our approach, test results are reported on a 12-cm-long Er+3-Yb+3 codoped phosphate glass fiber laser. The laser output reaches 5 W using 23-W pumping into six coreless fibers. Above threshold, the laser has ∼24% optical-to-optical conversion efficiency (with ∼64% being the theoretical maximum). The linearity of the input-output characteristic for the laser suggests that the output power can be scaled up by applying higher pump power.
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U2 - 10.1109/LPT.2004.831977
DO - 10.1109/LPT.2004.831977
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:4444384043
VL - 16
SP - 2024
EP - 2026
JO - IEEE Photonics Technology Letters
JF - IEEE Photonics Technology Letters
SN - 1041-1135
IS - 9
ER -