We have demonstrated a monolithic cladding-pumped ytterbium-doped single all-fiber laser oscillator generating 1 kW of CW signal power at 1080 nm with 71% slope efficiency and near diffraction-limited beam quality. Fiber components were highly integrated on "spliceless" passive fibers to promote laser efficiency and alleviate non-linear effects. The laser was pumped through a 7:1 pump combiner with seven 200-W 91x nm fiber-pigtailed wavelength-beam-combined diode-stack modules. The signal power of such a single all-fiber laser oscillator showed no evidence of roll-over, and the highest output was limited only by available pump power.

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High-power combiner designs (such as kilowatt-class combiners and beyond) are increasingly aggressive on brightness conservation in order to reduce the brightness loss of the pumps as much as possible in both direct diode combining and pump and signal coupling, especially with the advent of next-generation high-power pumps. Since most of the pump loss is due to brightness loss across the combiner, tighter designs (close to the brightness limit) are considerably more sensitive to variations in the input power distribution as a function of numerical aperture ; for instance, next-generation, high-power multi-emitter pumps are likely to have larger numerical apertures than conventional single-emitter diodes. As a consequence, pump insertion loss for a given combiner design sitting close to the brightness limit should be dependant on the input power distribution. Aside from presenting a manufacturing challenge, high brightness combiners also imply more sophisticated testing to allow a deeper understanding of the loss with respect to the far-field distribution of the pump inputs and thus enable the extrapolation of loss for an arbitrary, cylindrically symmetric radiant intensity distribution. In this paper, we present a novel test method to measure loss as a function of numerical aperture (NA) fill factor using a variable NA source with square-shaped far field distributions. Results are presented for a range of combiners, such as 7x1 and 19x1 pump combiners, with different brightness ratio and fiber inputs. Combiners violating the brightness conservation equation are also characterized in order to estimate the loss as a function of input power vs. NA distribution and fill factor.

Light absorption in structural adhesives constitutes the main source of heat in tapered fused bundle (TFB) devices. Efficient heat dissipation solutions were developed by studying these thermal loads. The relative merits of transparent vs. opaque package designs were established experimentally. In the former, light escapes without being absorbed by the package walls, whereas in the latter, the spurious optical signal is directly absorbed and dissipated. The fact that heat is generated directly in the adhesive largely favors the opaque package, which offers more efficient heat extraction. By using a thermally conductive package, a temperature rise of 1.1°C per Watt of dissipated power was measured. These numbers demonstrate that passive heat sinking at 20°C is sufficient to allow reliable operation up to 45Watts of dissipated power (1kW with 0.2dB optical loss) without compromising long-term reliability.