Theoretical and Experimental Study of High-Peak-Power High-Brightness Quasi-CW Fiber Laser

Abstract

The main factors limiting the power scaling of high-peak-power high-brightness quasi-continuous wave (QCW) fiber laser oscillator and a possible solution are analyzed in this paper. The impacts of fiber length and grating parameters on the output power are studied by rate equations. Under the optimized parameters, a high-brightness QCW fiber laser oscillator with a peak power of 7.3 kW is presented experimentally by using a 24 meter long spindle-shaped Yb-doped fiber with a constant core cladding ratio, and that is the best performance of peak power and brightness in near-single-mode QCW fiber lasers at present to the best of our knowledge. The corresponding pulse energy is 0.57 J and the beam quality M2 factor is about 1.43 under the condition of repetition frequency of 1 kHz and pulse width of 100 μs. The details are analyzed, and also the limiting factors of further power scaling, strategies of suppressing nonlinear effects and the principle of optical device parameter optimization.

Keywords

• Fiber lasers
• ytterbium
• high-power fiber lasers (HPFL)
• quasi-continuous wave (QCW)
• near-single-mode