Lasing.

lasers optical fibre

A fiber laser or fibre laser is a laser in which the active gain medium is an optical fiber doped with
rare-earth elements such as erbium, ytterbium, neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium, and
thulium. They are related to doped fiber amplifiers, which provide light amplification without lasing.
Fiber nonlinearities, such as stimulated Raman scattering or four-wave mixing can also provide gain
and thus serve as gain media for a fiber laser.

The advantages of fiber lasers over other types include:

Light is already coupled into a flexible fiber: The fact that the light is already in a fiber allows it to be
easily delivered to a movable focusing element. This is important for laser cutting, welding, and
folding of metals and polymers.

High output power: Fiber lasers can have active regions several kilometers long, and so can provide
very high optical gain. They can support kilowatt levels of continuous output power because of the
fiber's high surface area to volume ratio, which allows efficient cooling.

High optical quality: The fiber's waveguiding properties reduce or eliminate thermal distortion of the
optical path, typically producing a diffraction-limited, high-quality optical beam.

Compact size: Fiber lasers are compact compared to rod or gas lasers of comparable power, because
the fiber can be bent and coiled to save space.

Reliability: Fiber lasers exhibit high vibrational stability, extended lifetime, and maintenance-free
turnkey operation.

High peak power and nanosecond pulses enable effective marking and engraving.

The additional power and better beam quality provide cleaner cut edges and faster cutting speeds.

Lower cost of ownership.

Fiber lasers are now being used to make high-performance surface-acoustic wave (SAW) devices.
These lasers raise throughput and lower cost of ownership in comparison to older solid-state laser
technology.[1]

Fiber laser can also refer to the machine tool that includes the fiber resonator.

Applications of fiber lasers include material processing (marking, engraving, cutting),

telecommunications, spectroscopy, medicine, and directed energy weapons.[2]

Design and manufacture

See also: Laser construction

Unlike most other types of lasers, the laser cavity in fiber lasers is constructed monolithically by
fusion splicing different types of fiber; fiber Bragg gratings replace conventional dielectric mirrors to
provide optical feedback. Another type is the single longitudinal mode operation of ultra narrow
distributed feedback lasers (DFB) where a phase-shifted Bragg grating overlaps the gain medium.
Fiber lasers are pumped by semiconductor laser diodes or by other fiber lasers. Q-switched pulsed
fiber lasers offer a compact, electrically efficient alternative to Nd:YAG technology.[1]

Double-clad fibers[edit]

Double-clad fiber

Main article: Double-clad fiber

Many high-power fiber lasers are based on double-clad fiber. The gain medium forms the core of the
fiber, which is surrounded by two layers of cladding. The lasing mode propagates in the core, while a
multimode pump beam propagates in the inner cladding layer. The outer cladding keeps this pump
light confined. This arrangement allows the core to be pumped with a much higher-power beam
than could otherwise be made to propagate in it, and allows the conversion of pump light with
relatively low brightness into a much higher-brightness signal. As a result, fiber lasers and amplifiers
are occasionally referred to as "brightness converters." There is an important question about the
shape of the double-clad fiber; a fiber with circular symmetry seems to be the worst possible
design.[3][4][5][6][7][8] The design should allow the core to be small enough to support only a few
(or even one) modes. It should provide sufficient cladding to confine the core and optical pump
section over a relatively short piece of the fiber.

Power scaling[edit]
10,000W SM Laser

Recent developments in fiber laser technology have led to a rapid and large rise in achieved
diffraction-limited beam powers from diode-pumped solid-state lasers. Due to the introduction of
large mode area (LMA) fibers as well as continuing advances in high power and high brightness
diodes, continuous-wave single-transverse-mode powers from Yb-doped fiber lasers have increased
from 100 W in 2001 to >20 kW. Commercial single-mode lasers have reached 10 kW in CW power.[9]
In 2014 a combined beam fiber laser demonstrated power of 30 kW.[10]

Mode locking[edit]

Main article: Mode-locking

Passive mode locking[edit]

Nonlinear polarization rotation[edit]

When linearly polarized light is incident to a piece of weakly birefringent fiber, the polarization of
the light will generally become elliptically polarized in the fiber. The orientation and ellipticity of the
final light polarization is fully determined by the fiber length and its birefringence. However, if the
intensity of the light is strong, the non-linear optical Kerr effect in the fiber must be considered,
which introduces extra changes to the light polarization. As the polarization change introduced by
the optical Kerr effect depends on the light intensity, if a polarizer is put behind the fiber, the light
intensity transmission through the polarizer will become light intensity dependent. Through
appropriately selecting the orientation of the polarizer or the length of the fiber, an artificial
saturable absorber effect with ultra-fast response could then be achieved in such a system, where
light of higher intensity experiences less absorption loss on the polarizer. The NPR technique makes
use of this artificial saturable absorption to achieve the passive mode locking in a fiber laser. Once a
mode-locked pulse is formed, the non-linearity of the fiber further shapes the pulse into an optical
soliton and consequently the ultrashort soliton operation is obtained in the laser. Soliton operation
is almost a generic feature of the fiber lasers mode-locked by this technique and has been
intensively investigated.

Semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs)[edit]

Semiconductor saturable absorbers were used for laser mode-locking as early as 1974 when p-type
germanium is used to mode lock a CO2 laser which generated pulses ~500 ps . Modern SESAMs are
III-V semiconductor single quantum well (SQW) or multiple quantum wells grown on semiconductor
distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs). They were initially used in a Resonant Pulse Modelocking (RPM)
scheme as starting mechanisms for Ti:Sapphire lasers which employed KLM as a fast saturable
absorber . RPM is another coupled-cavity mode-locking technique. Different from APM lasers which
employ non-resonant Kerr-type phase nonlinearity for pulse shortening, RPM employs the amplitude
nonlinearity provided by the resonant band filling effects of semiconductors. SESAMs were soon
developed into intracavity saturable absorber devices because of more inherent simplicity with this
structure. Since then, the use of SESAMs has enabled the pulse durations, average powers, pulse
energies and repetition rates of ultrafast solid-state lasers to be improved by several orders of
magnitude. Average power of 60 W and repetition rate up to 160 GHz were obtained. By using
SESAM-assisted KLM, sub-6 fs pulses directly from a Ti: Sapphire oscillator was achieved. A major
advantage SESAMs have over other saturable absorber techniques is that absorber parameters can
be easily controlled over a wide range of values. For example, saturation fluence can be controlled
by varying the reflectivity of the top reflector while modulation depth and recovery time can be
tailored by changing the low temperature growing conditions for the absorber layers . This freedom
of design has further extended the application of SESAMs into modelocking of fiber lasers where a
relatively high modulation depth is needed to ensure self-starting and operation stability. Fiber
lasers working at ~ 1 m and 1.5 m were successfully demonstrated.[11][12][13][14][15][16]

Carbon nanotube saturable absorbers[edit]

Graphene saturable absorbers[edit]

Graphene is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a
honeycomb crystal lattice. Optical absorption from graphene can become saturated when the input
optical intensity is above a threshold value. This nonlinear optical behavior is termed saturable
absorption and the threshold value is called the saturation fluency.[citation needed] Graphene can
be saturated readily under strong excitation over the visible to near-infrared region, due to the
universal optical absorption and zero band gap.[17] This has relevance for the mode locking of fiber
lasers, where wideband tunability may be obtained using graphene as the saturable absorber.[18]
Due to this special property, graphene has wide application in ultrafast photonics.[19][20][21]
Furthermore, comparing with the SWCNTs, as graphene has a 2D structure it should have much
smaller non-saturable loss and much higher damage threshold. Self-started mode locking and stable
soliton pulse emission with high energy have been achieved with a graphene saturable absorber in
an erbium-doped fiber laser.[22][23][24] Atomic layer graphene possesses wavelength-insensitive
ultrafast saturable absorption, which can be exploited as a full-band mode locker. With an erbium-
doped dissipative soliton fiber laser mode locked with few layer graphene, it has been
experimentally shown that dissipative solitons with continuous wavelength tuning as large as 30 nm
(15701600 nm) can be obtained.[25]

Active mode locking[edit]

Active mode-locking is normally achieved by modulating the loss (or gain) of the laser cavity at a
repetition rate equivalent to the cavity frequency, or a harmonic thereof. In practice, the modulator
can be acousto-optic or electro-optic modulator, Mach-Zehnder integrated-optic modulators, or a
semiconductor electro-absorption modulator (EAM). The principle of active mode-locking with a
sinusoidal modulation. In this situation, optical pulses will form in such a way as to minimize the loss
from the modulator. The peak of the pulse would automatically adjust in phase to be at the point of
minimum loss from the modulator. Because of the slow variation of sinusoidal modulation, it is not
very straightforward for generating ultrashort optical pulses (< 1ps) using this method.

For stable operation, the cavity length must precisely match the period of the modulation signal or
some integer multiple of it. The most powerful technique to solve this is regenerative mode locking
i.e. a part of the output signal of the mode-locked laser is detected; the beatnote at the round-trip
frequency is filtered out from the detector, and sent to an amplifier, which drives the loss modulator
in the laser cavity. This procedure enforces synchronism if the cavity length undergoes fluctuations
due to acoustic vibrations or thermal expansion. By using this method, highly stable mode-locked
lasers have been achieved. The major advantage of active mode-locking is that it allows
synchronized operation of the mode-locked laser to an external radio frequency (RF) source. This is
very useful for optical fiber communication where synchronization is normally required between
optical signal and electronic control signal. Also active mode-locked fiber can provide much higher
repetition rate than passive mode-locking. Currently, fiber lasers and semiconductor diode lasers are
the two most important types of lasers where active mode-locking are applied.

Dark soliton fiber lasers[edit]

In the non-mode locking regime,the first dark soliton fiber laser has been successfully achieved in an
all-normal dispersion erbium-doped ber laser with a polarizer in cavity. Experimentally finding that
apart from the bright pulse emission, under appropriate conditions the ber laser could also emit
single or multiple dark pulses. Based on numerical simulations we interpret the dark pulse formation
in the laser as a result of dark soliton shaping.[26]

Multiwavelength fiber lasers[edit]

Recently,multiwavelength dissipative soliton in an all normal dispersion fiber laser passively mode-
locked with a SESAM has been generated. It is found that depending on the cavity birefringence,
stable single-, dual- and triple-wavelength dissipative soliton can be formed in the laser. Its
generation mechanism can be traced back to the nature of dissipative soliton.[15]

Fiber disk lasers[edit]

3 fiber disk lasers

Main article: Fiber disk laser

Another type of fiber laser is the fiber disk laser. In such lasers, the pump is not confined within the
cladding of the fiber, but instead pump light is delivered across the core multiple times because the
core is coiled on itself like a rope. This configuration is suitable for power scaling in which many
pump sources are used around the periphery of the coil.[27][28][29][30] Fiber disk lasers have
exceptional protection against back reflection compared to traditional fiber lasers. Fiber disk lasers
can be used for welding and cutting applications requiring more than 1000 watts of power.

Fiber lasers are compact and rugged, don't go out of alignment, and easily dissipate thermal
energy. They come in many forms, sharing technology with other type of lasers but providing
their own unique advantages.

The fiber laser is a variation on the standard solid-state laser, with the medium being a clad fiber
rather than a rod, a slab, or a disk. Laser light is emitted by a dopant in the central core of the
fiber, and the core structure can range from simple to fairly complex. A key factor for fiber lasers
is that the fiber has a large surface-to-volume ratio so that heat can be dissipated relatively
easily.

Fiber lasers are optically pumped, most commonly with laser diodes but in a few cases with other
fiber lasers. The optics used in these systems are usually fiber components, with most or all of
the components fiber-coupled to one another. In some cases, bulk optics are used, and
sometimes an internal fiber-coupling system is combined with external bulk optics.

A diode pump source can be a single diode, an array, or many separate pump diodes, each with
a fiber going into a coupler. The doped fiber has a cavity mirror on each end; in practice, these
are fiber Bragg gratings, which can be fabricated within the fiber. There are no bulk optics on the
end, unless the output beam goes into something other than a fiber. The fiber can be coiled, so
the laser cavity can be many meters long if desired.

Dual-core structure
The structure of the fiber used in fiber lasers is important. The most common geometry is a dual-
core structure (see Fig. 1). An undoped outer core (sometimes called an inner cladding) collects
the pump light and guides it along the fiber. Stimulated emission generated in the fiber passes
through the inner core, which often is singlemode. The inner core contains the dopant (ytterbium
or erbium) that is stimulated to emit radiation by the pump light. Numerous noncircular variations
exist on the shape of the outer core; these shapes, which include hexagonal, D-shaped, and
rectangular, decrease the chances of the pump light missing the central core.
 FIGURE 1. The structure of a fiber laser includes a doped inner
core, which is the laser itself; an undoped outer core (also called
an inner cladding) through which the pump light is channeled;
and an outer cladding.

A fiber laser can be end- or side-pumped (see Fig. 2). In end-pumping, the light from one or
many pump lasers is fired into the end of the fiber. In side-pumping, pump light is coupled into
the side of the fiber; actually, it is fed into a coupler that couples it into the outer core. This is
different from side-pumping a laser rod, where the light comes in orthogonally to the axis.

FIGURE 2. A fiber laser can be end-pumped with one or many

lasers, or side-pumped (usually with many lasers) by side-
coupling pump light into the outer core.

Many design considerations go into making this work. Considerable attention is spent on
coupling the pump light into the core, matching it to the optical absorption, and coupling that
pump light into the inner core to produce a population inversion that will result in stimulated
emission in the inner core. The laser core can have various degrees of gain, depending on the
doping in the fiber as well as on the fiber length. These are factors that the design engineer
would adjust to get the performance that is needed.

Power limitations can arise, particularly from working within a singlemode fiber. Such a fiber core
has a very small cross-sectional area, and as a result, very high-intensity light going through it.
Nonlinear Brillouin scattering becomes increasingly important at these high intensities, and can
limit output at multikilowatt levels. If the output is high enough, the fiber end can be optically
damaged.

Features of fiber lasers

Using a fiber as a laser medium gives a long interaction length, which works well for diode-
pumping. This geometry results in high photon conversion efficiency, as well as a rugged and
compact design. When fiber components are spliced together, there are no discrete optics to
adjust or to get out of alignment.

The fiber-based laser design is highly adaptable. It can be adapted to do anything from welding
heavy sheets of metal to producing femtosecond pulses. Many variations exist on the fiber-laser
theme, as well as some configurations that are not, strictly speaking, fiber lasers. Fiber amplifiers
provide single-pass amplification; they're used in telecommunications because they can amplify
many wavelengths simultaneously. Fiber amplification is also used in the master-oscillator
power-amplifier (MOPA) configuration, where the intent is to generate a higher output from a
fiber laser. In some circumstances, an amplifier is used even with a continuous-wave (CW) laser.

Another example is fiber-amplified spontaneous-emission sources, in which the stimulated

emission is suppressed. Yet another example is the Raman fiber laser, which relies on Raman
gain that essentially Raman-shifts the wavelength. This is an application that's not in wide use,
although it's certainly being used in research. In fact, some new research is going on into using
fluoride glass fibers for Raman lasing and amplification rather than the standard silica fibers.

However, the fiber host is usually silica glass with a rare earth dopant in the core. The primary
dopants are ytterbium and erbium. Ytterbium has center wavelengths ranging from about 1030 to
1080 nm and can emit in a broader range of wavelengths if pushed. Using pump diodes emitting
in the 940 nm range can make the photon deficit very small. Ytterbium has none of the self-
quenching effects that occur in neodymium at high densities, which is why neodymium is used in
bulk lasers and ytterbium is used in fiber lasers (they both provide roughly the same wavelength).

Erbium fiber lasers emit at 1530 to 1620 nm, which is an eye-safe wavelength range. This can be
frequency-doubled to generate light at 780 nma wavelength that's not available from fiber
lasers in other ways. And finally, ytterbium can be added to erbium so that the ytterbium absorbs
pump light and transfers that energy to erbium. Thulium is another dopant that emits even
deeper into the near-infrared (NIR; 1750 to 2100 nm), and is thus another eye-safe material.

High efficiency
Fiber lasers are quasi-three-level systems. A pump photon excites a transition from a ground
state to an upper level; the laser transition is a drop from the lowest part of the upper level down
into some of the split ground states. This is very efficient: For example, ytterbium with a pump
photon at 940 nm produces an emitted photon at 1030 nm-a quantum defect (lost energy) of only
about 9% (see table).

In contrast, neodymium pumped on its standard 808 nm pump line has a quantum defect of
about 24%. So ytterbium has an inherently higher efficiency, although not all that efficiency can
be realized because some photons are lost. Ytterbium can be pumped in a number of bands.
Erbium can be pumped at either 1480 or 980 nm; the latter is not as efficient from a photon
defect point of view, but is useful even so because better pump sources are available at 980 nm.
Overall fiber-laser efficiency is the result of a two-stage process. First is the efficiency of the
pump diode. Semiconductor lasers are very efficient, with on the order of 50% electrical-to-
optical efficiency. Laboratory results are even better, with 70% or even more of the electrical
pump energy being converted into light. When this output is matched carefully to the fiber laser's
absorption line, the result is the pump efficiency.

The second is the optical-to-optical conversion efficiency. With a small photon defect, high
excitation and extraction efficiency can be achieved, producing an optical-to-optical conversion
efficiency on the order of 60% to 70%. The result is a wall-plug efficiency in the 25% to 35%
range.

Configurations for many purposes

Continuous-wave fiber lasers can be either single- or multimode (in terms of transverse modes).
A single mode produces a high-quality beam for materials working or sending a beam through
the atmosphere, while multimode industrial lasers can generate higher raw power. If an
application does not require the extremely high intensities resulting from singlemode operation,
the higher total power from multimode operation is often an advantagefor example, for some
kinds of cutting and welding, and particularly for heat-treating, where a large area is illuminated.

Long-pulse fiber lasers are essentially quasi-CW lasers, typically producing millisecond-type
pulses. Typically they have a 10% duty cycle (resulting from the pump diode modulation). This
results in higher peak powers than in CW operationtypically on the order of ten times higher.
This can be an advantage for some kinds of materials working such as pulse drilling. The
repetition rate can range up to 500 Hz, depending on the pulse duration.

Q-switching is possible in fiber lasers, with the principle being the same as for bulk Q-switched
lasers. Typical pulse lengths range from low nanosecond up to the microsecond range; the
longer the fiber, the more time is needed to Q-switch the output, producing a longer pulse.

Fiber properties impose some limitations on Q-switching. Nonlinearities are more severe in a
fiber laser due to the core's small cross-sectional area, so the peak power has to be somewhat
limited. One can either use bulk Q-switches, giving higher performance, or a fiber Q-switch,
which is spliced to the ends of the active part of the fiber laser.

The Q-switched pulses can be amplified in fiber or in bulk. An example of the latter is found at
the National Ignition Facility (NIF; Livermore, CA), where a fiber laser is the master oscillator for
the 192 beams of the NIF laser: Small pulses from the fiber laser are amplified up to megajoule
size in large slabs of doped glass.

In modelocked fiber lasers, the repetition rate depends on the length of the gain material, as in
any kind of modelocking scheme, while pulse duration depends on the gain bandwidth. The
shortest achievable oscillator pulses are in the 50 fs range, with more typical durations in the 100
fs range. Shorter pulses can be generated in oscillator-amplifier systems with external chirped-
pulse amplification and subsequent pulse compression.

An important difference exists between erbium- and ytterbium-doped fibers, resulting from the
fact that the two are operating in different dispersion modes. Erbium-doped fibers emit at 1550
nm, which is in the anomalous-dispersion region; this allows the production of solitons.
Ytterbium-doped fibers are in the positive or normal dispersion realm; as a result, they generate
strongly chirped pulses. As a result, a chirped fiber Bragg grating may be needed to dechirp the
pulses to compress the pulse length.

There are a number of ways to modify fiber-laser pulses, particularly for things like picosecond
ultrafast research. Photonic-crystal fibers can be made with extremely small cores to produce
strong nonlinear effects for applications such as supercontinuum generation. In contrast,
photonic crystals also can be made with very large singlemode cores to avoid nonlinear effects at
high power.

Bendable large-core photonic-crystal fibers are being created for high-power applications; one of
the tricks being looked at is intentionally bending such a fiber enough that any undesired higher-
order modes will go away, leaving only the fundamental transverse mode. Nonlinearities allow
harmonics to be generated; sum and difference frequency mixing can create higher frequencies
and shorter wavelengths. Nonlinear effects can also produce pulse compression, leading the way
to the production of frequency combs.

In a supercontinuum source, very short pulses produce a broad continuous spectrum via self-
phase modulation. In one example, initial 6 ps pulses at 1050 nm (from a ytterbium fiber laser)
produces a spectrum ranging from the ultraviolet to beyond 1600 nm, with some irregularity
across the spectrum (see Fig. 3). Another supercontinuum source, this one working in the IR, is
pumped with an erbium fiber laser at 1550 nm. In this case, the spectrum of the supercontinuum
source varies with pulse width. This design achieves a range of more than an octave, ranging out
past 2200 nm.