1.3 kW monolithic linearly polarized single-mode master oscillator power amplifier and strategies for mitigating mode instabilities

We report on the high-power amplification of a 1064 nm linearly polarized laser in an all-fiber polarizationmaintained master oscillator power amplifier,which can operate at an output power level of 1.3 kW.The beam quality(M^2) was measured to be <1.2 at full power operation.The polarization extinction rate of the fiber amplifier was measured to be above 94% before mode instabilities(MIs) set in,which reduced to about 90% after the onset of MI.The power scaling capability of strategies for suppressing MI is analyzed based on a semianalytical model,the theoretical results of which agree with the experimental results.It shows that mitigating MI by coiling the gain fiber is an effective and practical method in standard double-cladding large mode area fiber,and,by tight coiling of the gain fiber to the radius of 5.5 cm,the MI threshold can be increased to three times higher than that without coiling or loose coiling.Experimental studies have been carried out to verify the idea,which has proved that MI was suppressed successfully in the amplifier by proper coiling.

High-power mid-infrared femtosecond master oscillator power amplifier Er:ZBLAN fiber laser system

High-power femtosecond mid-infrared(MIR)lasers are of vast importance to both fundamental research and applications.We report a high-power femtosecond master oscillator power amplifier laser system consisting of a singlemode Er:ZBLAN fiber mode-locked oscillator and pre-amplifier followed by a large-mode-area Er:ZBLAN fiber main amplifier.The main amplifier is actively cooled and bidirectionally pumped at 976 nm,generating a slope efficiency of 26.9%.Pulses of 8.12 W,148 fs at 2.8μm with a repetition rate of 69.65 MHz are achieved.To the best of our knowledge,this is the highest average power ever achieved from a femtosecond MIR laser source.Such a compact ultrafast laser system is promising for a wide range of applications,such as medical surgery and material processing.

Incoherent and coherent beam combination for master oscillator/power amplifier system with stimulated Brillouin scattering mirror

In this paper, we studied incoherent and coherent beam combining for the master oscillator/power amplifier （MOPA） system with stimulated Brillouin scattering （SBS） mirror. Optic field intensity distributions in the near and far field are numerically calculated for the two kinds of system. The results show that good beam quality in the far field could be obtained. It provides a theoretical basis for experimental research in the future.

Theory of noise in a kilo-Hz cascaded high-energy Yb-doped nanosecond pulsed fiber amplifier

A theoretical analysis of noise in a high-power cascaded fiber amplifier is presented. Unlike the noise theory in low power communication, the noise of a high power system is redefined as the leaked output energy between pulses with coherent beat noise uncounted. This definition is more appropriate for high power usage in which the pulse energy receives more attention than the pulse shape integrity. Then the low power pre-amplifying stages are considered as linear amplification and analyzed by linear theory. In the high-power amplification stages, the inversion is assumed to recover linearly in the time interval between pulses. The time shape of the output pulse is different from that of the input signal because of different gains at the front and back ends of the pulse. Then, a criterion is provided to distinguish the nonlinear and linear amplifications based on the signal-to-noise ratio （SNR） analysis. Then, an experiment that shows that the output SNR actually drops off in nonlinear amplification is performed. The change in the noise factor can be well evaluated by pulse shape distortion.

Low-repetition-rate, all-polarization-maintaining Yb-doped fiber laser mode-locked by a semiconductor saturable absorber

A low-repetition-rate, all-polarization-maintaining（PM）-fiber sub-nanosecond oscillator is presented, which is simple and low-cost, composed of standard components. The ring cavity is elongated by 114-m-long standard PM fiber, and passively mode-locked by a fiber pigtailed semiconductor saturable absorber. Linearly polarized pulses with 1.66 MHz repetition rate and 22 dB polarization extinction ratio are generated at a wavelength of 1030 nm, which is determined by an intracavity filter. In addition, to demonstrate that the oscillator is a good seed for high energy pulse generation, an all-fiber master oscillator power amplifier is built and amplified pulses with energy about 2 μJ are obtained.