Fiber laser

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Fiber laser
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.
Advantages and applications
A laser cutting machine with a 2kW continuous
wave 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.
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.
Design and manufacture
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.
Fiber laser
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Double-clad fibers
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. 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
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 100W in 2001
to >20kW. Commercial single-mode lasers have reached 10kW in
CW power. In 2014 a combined beam fiber laser demonstrated power
of 30kw.
Mode locking
Passive mode locking
Nonlinear polarization rotation
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.
Fiber laser
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Semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs)
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 developedinto 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 160GHz 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 ~ 1m and 1.5m were successfully
demonstrated.
[1][2][3][4][5]
Graphene saturable absorbers
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.
[6]
This has relevance for the mode
locking of fiber lasers, where wideband tunability may be obtained using graphene as the saturable absorber.
[7]
Due
to this special property, graphene has wide application in ultrafast photonics.
[8][9]
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. 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 30nm (1570 1600nm) can be obtained.
Active mode locking
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
Fiber laser
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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
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.
[10]
Multiwavelength fiber lasers
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.
Fiber disk lasers
3 fiber disk lasers
Another type of fiber laser is the fiber disk laser. In such, the pump
is not confined within the cladding of the fiber (as in the
double-clad fiber), but 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.
References
[1] H. Zhang et al, Induced solitons formed by cross polarization coupling in a
birefringent cavity fiber laser (http:/ / www. sciencenet. cn/ upload/ blog/ file/
2009/ 1/ 2009130111724898121.pdf), Opt. Lett., 33, 2317 2319.(2008).
[2] D.Y. Tang et al, Observation of high-order polarization-locked vector solitons in a fiber laser (http:/ / www3. ntu. edu. sg/ home2006/
zhan0174/ Observation of High-Order Polarization-Locked Vector Solitons in a Fiber Laser. pdf), Physical Review Letters, 101, 153904
(2008).
[3] H. Zhang et al, Coherent energy exchange between components of a vector soliton in fiber lasers, Optics Express, 16,12618 12623 (2008).
[4] H. Zhang et al, Multi-wavelength dissipative soliton operation of an erbium-doped fiber laser (http:/ / www. opticsinfobase. org/ abstract.
cfm?URI=oe-17-15-12692), Optics Express, Vol. 17, Issue 2, pp.12692-12697
[5] L.M. Zhao et al, Polarization rotation locking of vector solitons in a fiber ring laser (http:/ / www. sciencenet. cn/ upload/ blog/ file/ 2009/ 2/
200921017037656137.pdf), Optics Express, 16,10053 10058 (2008).
[6] Z. Sun, T. Hasan, F. Torrisi, D. Popa, G. Privitera, F. Wang, F. Bonaccorso, D. M. Basko and A. C. Ferrari, ACS Nano," Graphene
Mode-Locked Ultrafast Laser (http:/ / dx.doi. org/ 10. 1021/ nn901703e)"
[7] Z. Sun, D. Popa, T. Hasan, F. Torrisi, F. Wang, E. Kelleher, J. Travers, V. Nicolosi and A. Ferrari, Nano Research," A stable, wideband
tunable, near transform-limited, graphene-mode-locked, ultrafast laser (http:/ / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1007/ s12274-010-0026-4)"
[8] Qiaoliang Bao, Han Zhang, Yu Wang, Zhenhua Ni, Yongli Yan, Ze Xiang Shen, Kian Ping Loh,and Ding Yuan Tang, Advanced Functional
Materials," Atomic layer graphene as saturable absorber for ultrafast pulsed lasers (http:/ / www3. ntu. edu. sg/ home2006/ zhan0174/ AFM.
pdf)"
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[9] F. Bonaccorso, Z. Sun, T. Hasan and A. C. Ferrari, Nature Photonics," Graphene photonics and optoelectronics (http:/ / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1038/
nphoton.2010.186)"
[10] Han Zhang, Dingyuan Tang, Luming Zhao and Wu Xuan, Dark pulse emission of a fiber laser (http:/ / www3. ntu. edu. sg/ home2006/
ZHAN0174/ pra. pdf)" PHYSICAL REVIEW A 80, 045803 2009
Article Sources and Contributors
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Article Sources and Contributors
Fiber laser Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=601781036 Contributors: Alex-engraver, Brad101, Conscious, Delusion23, Dicklyon, DoctorKubla, Domitori, Dougher, Elenao,
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Wtshymanski, Yanje03, 44 anonymous edits
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