Large Mode Area All-Solid Optical Fiber Lasers with Tailored Microstructured Cladding

Abstract

Improvements, in terms of output power, spatial beam quality, bend insensitivity … are still required in the field of single-mode fiber lasers. A major trend is to increase the active core area to increase the thresholds of nonlinear effects while ensuring a transverse single-mode behavior. Actually, increasing the active ions' concentration is also demanded since it allows a drastic reduction of the fiber length, everything being equal. Two non-exclusive strategies are laid out to overcome fiber laser limitations. On the one hand, a large mode area photonic bandgap fiber is shown to lead to a transverse single-mode fiber laser with very good lasing efficiency. On the other hand, it is demonstrated that surrounding a highly multimode active core by a properly designed microstructured cladding allows the fiber laser to be operated in the single-mode regime.

Keywords:

• fiber lasers
• microstructured cladding
• photonic bandgap effect

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the French Research National Agency under grants ANR-06-BLAN-0091-01 and ANR-05-BLAN-0080. D. Gaponov acknowledges the financial support of French ministère des Affaires étrangères.

Author biographies were not available for M. M. Bubnov, E. M. Dianov, M. Yu. Salganskii, V. F. Khopin, M. Yu. Yashkov, and A. N. Guryanov at the time of this publication.