An all-fiber ultra-low numerical aperture high power fiber MOPA system with an output power above 500 W

Abstract

Optical fiber technology has been developed dramatically in the last two decades. Especially, the invention of the Large Mode Area (LMA) fibers has made a great impact, and consequently the power scale of the fiber lasers started to increase exponentially [1]. However, at a certain point this increase has been saturated due to the non-linear effects such as Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) and Thermal Modal Instability (TMI). Therefore, a new approach has been proposed to mitigate these so called problems by decreasing the numerical aperture (NA) of the LMA active fiber so that it behaves like an intrinsically single mode fiber. In the literature, an active fiber having ultra-low (<; 0.04) NA, is proposed [2, 3] in 2009; and finally, the highest power, which is 4.3 kW, was demonstrated in 2017 [4]. However, all of these works based on free space orientation. In this letter, we demonstrate all-fiber and monolithic version of the high power low NA fiber laser system based on an Yb-doped active fiber having 26 μm/410 μm core/cladding diameters respectively with a NA of 0.032 which has also been verified experimentally.