Photodarkening in Yb doped fibers was examined at 633 nm in-situ during cladding pumping at 915 nm with varying pump powers and with no indication of an onset threshold. For the first time, the partial bleaching of the photodarkening loss by the pump power itself was observed. We found the relaxation to well-defined equilibrium states of the core excess loss, depending on the Yb inversion. From the dependence of the measured rate constant on the density of excited Yb ions we conclude, that on average 3 to 4 excited Yb ions create or bleach one color center responsible for the core excess loss.

We report on photodarkening (PD) investigations at Yb doped fibers with specific variation of the concentrations of the codopants aluminum and phosphorus, measured during cladding pumping at 915 nm. A core composition with equal content of Al and P is most promising to achieve Yb fibers with low PD, high laser efficiency and low numerical aperture of the laser core despite of high codoping. A laser output power of more than 100 W was demonstrated on such a fiber with a slope efficiency of 72%. The correlation of the PD loss with the NIR-excited cooperative luminescence encourages the supposition that cooperative energy transfer from excited Yb(3+) ions to the atomic defect precursors in the core glass enables the formation of color centers in the pump-induced PD process.

We report on a cladding-pumped, ytterbium-doped large-core-area fiber amplifier that is capable of generating 51.2 W of average power at a 1064-nm center wavelength, an 80-MHz repetition rate, and a 10-ps pulse duration. In an ytterbium-doped large-mode-area fiber these pulses could be amplified up to 43.2 W with diffraction-limited beam quality (M(2)~1.3) . Power scaling limitations that arise from nonlinear distortions such as self-phase modulation and stimulated Raman scattering are discussed.

Long-range distributed strain and temperature measurements with Brillouin optical-fibre time-domain analysis (BOTDA) suffer from systematic errors that are due to the measurement principle itself. The significance of these errors is analysed theoretically and proved by experiments. A compensation method based on the measurement both of the pulsed and of the CW lightwave eliminates these errors and significantly improves the BOTDA method. Measurement deviations of more than 20% from a given temperature difference were reduced to less than 3%.

We report on the thermal treatment of photodarkened Yb-doped fiber samples. The method of non-isothermal bleaching at different temperature ramp rates can be used to determine the thermal energy distribution of photodarkening induced color centers. A distributed activation energy with a mean value of about 1.3 eV and a FWHM of 0.5 eV was found. Spectral changes during thermal treatment were observed and could be interpreted, e.g. as an enhancement of the absorption cross section.