Before starting, we warn you that there’re some musical refe-

rences, and who guesses all of them will win a surprise. In this
presentation we’re going to speak about the Functioning of a La-
ser, the Fiber Laser and some Applications. The points we’ll
address are as follows; and these are the key-concepts.

1. What is a laser?

The term laser is an acronym that stands for Light Amplifi-

cation by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. The laser is a
device that allows to amplify a coherent beam of light.

A laser is made of three parts:

Active medium: is the material medium where optical ampli-
fication happens.
Optical cavity: is a system formed by two parallel mirrors
that serves to keep the light circulating through the active
medium the most time possible. One of the mirrors is a high
reflector and the other is a partial reflector.
Pumping source: is the part that provides energy to the active
medium to excite its atoms.
The result is coherent, collimated and monochromatic light.

2. Physical foundations

This is the notation that we’ll use from now.

The active medium is composed by atoms that will have some

electron in the state given by the ket |n⟩. Considering all the
atoms and according to the Fermi-Dirac statistics, there will be
more electrons in the state |n⟩ than in the state |n + 1⟩, where

1
this last state actually is this: C1 ↠|n⟩.

In other words, there will be more atoms in the ground state

than in excited states.

1
f (E) = E−µ (1)
Ae +1 kT

As we can see in this equation, if the energy increases then

the probability of an electron having a determined energy E
decreases.

If an atom is in the ground state and is stimulated with a pho-

ton, an electron pass from the state |n⟩ to the state |n + 1⟩.

After, the electron will return to the state |n⟩, emitting a pho-
ton. So, we don’t win any extra photon.

For this reason, we need the most atoms to be in excited states.

If a photon arrives at an excited atom, two photons will be emit-
ted: the incident one and the photon emitted when the electron
goes to a lower level of energy.

We can get a population inversion by providing energy, so we

went from having this N|n⟩ > N|n+1⟩ to this N|n⟩ < N|n+1⟩.
In this way we can produce a cascade emission of coherent
photons.

2
3. Fiber laser

There are a lot of types of laser, but we’re going to go deep

into the fiber lasers. A fiber laser is a laser in which the active
medium is optical fiber. We are going to focus in the Single-
Frequency Continious-Wave Fiber Lasers.

The process would be the following one:

1. Light is created by transforming electricity into photons that
are pumped into the optical fiber cable.
2. The light is guided in the optical fiber cable. Optical fiber ca-
bles use two basic components: the core (where light travels)
and the cladding (the material that surrounds the core). To-
tal internal reflection occurs because the cladding has a lower
refractive index than the core.
3. Eventually the light enters in a small region where the fiber
has been mixed with a rare-earth element. In this region we
have what is known by Fiber Bragg Grating. Depending on
parameters such as grating length and index change, a Bragg
reflector can function as a narrow-band transmission or re-
flection filter, even as a broadband mirror.

Then, a Fiber Bragg Grating can be arranged to function as

band-pass filters. Also, it serves as one or both ends of the
laser cavity, depending on the laser configuration.

The wavelength that coincides with the distance between two

consecutive reflectors of the FBG will experience the ampli-
fication in cascade.

3
4. Applications

Now, we’re going to introduce some applications of the laser,

and we’ll specify if this applications can be tackled with a fiber
laser or not.

4.1. Fiber Laser uses

The Fiber Laser is used in the industrial field, as a cutting,

engraving and cleaning tool; and also is used in many fields as
sensors. If the fiber is stretched or compressed, the FBG can
measure the deformation. Also the FBG has sensibility to the
temperature.

4.2. Use of another lasers different to fiber laser

Some applications that are not related to the fiber lasers are:
Spatial topography: for the measurement of the distance bet-
ween objects in the space by using mirrors.
Medicine: as a cutting, cauterising and burning tool.
Spectroscopy: to atomize and excite a sample, producing a
spectre.

These are the references that we’ve used for this work and...
that’s all folks!