In this Letter, a high-power, high-brightness all-fiberized Raman amplifier based on a cladding-pumping scheme is presented for the first time, to the best of our knowledge. The triple-clad passive fiber is employed as Raman gain fiber in the laser system. The maximum output power is 762.6 W emitting at 1130 nm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest power in the fields of cladding-pumped Raman amplifiers. Through a cladding-pumping process, the beam quality parameter M 2 improves from 6.12 of seed laser to 2.24 at maximum output power of 762.6 W, while the best M 2 is 1.9 at 267.2 W. It is also the best beam quality of Raman laser with brightness enhancement in any kind of configuration (graded-index fiber or multi-clad fiber, laser or amplifier, all-fiber or free-space configuration) with power of over 100 W.

Raman fiber lasers (RFLs) are currently promising and versatile light sources for a variety of applications. So far, operations of high power and brightness-enhanced RFLs have absorbed enormous interests along with rapid progress. Nevertheless, the stable Raman lasing at high power levels remains challenged by the thermal effects. In an effort to realize more effective thermal management in high power RFLs, here we demonstrate, for the first time, an all-fiberized RFA employing metal-coated passive fiber enabling high power lasing. By employing aluminum to the cladding of graded-index (GRIN) passive fiber, the thermal abstraction of the laser devices is more sufficient to support low-temperature operation. The maximum output power reaches 3.083 kW at 1130 nm with a conversion efficiency of 78.7%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Raman laser generation based on metal-coated passive fiber. Meanwhile, it is also the highest power attained in the fields of all kinds of Raman lasers based on merely nonlinear gain.

Kilowatt-level high efficiency all-fiberized Raman fiber amplifier based on pure passive fiber is proposed for the first time in this paper. The laser system is established on master oscillator power amplification configuration while a piece of graded-index passive fiber is utilized as stokes shifting as well as gain medium, which is entirely irrelevant to rare-earth-doped gain mechanism. When the pump power is 1368.8 W, we obtained 1002.3 W continuous-wave laser power at 1060 nm with the corresponding opticalto-optical efficiency of 84%. The beam parameter M 2 improves from 9.17 of the pump laser to 5.11 of the signal laser through the amplification process, and the brightness enhancement is about 2.57 at maximum output power as a consequence of the beam clean-up process in the graded-index fiber. To the best of our knowledge, we have demonstrated the first kilowatt-level high efficiency Raman fiber amplifier based on pure passive fiber with brightness enhancement.INDEX TERMS Fiber lasers, fiber nonlinear optics, high power amplifiers, Raman scattering.

In this paper, we study the thermal dissipation of Raman fiber laser and amplifier utilizing pure passive fiber as gain medium for the first time. Take into account the convective and conductive heat transferring process in the fiber, we consider the heat transferring and Raman conversion model based on the thermal conduction equations and the Raman coupled equations in the fiber. With the simulation of power distribution, the thermal profiles of Raman fiber laser are analyzed, including the transverse and longitudinal distributions of the heat load density, temperature, and thermal-induced refractive index change in the fiber. Meanwhile, the heat dissipation in multimode graded-index fiber and step-index fiber are also calculated and compared. The results show that the amplifier is superior to the resonator in heat alleviation, and the forward pumping scheme is also better to ease the thermal load than the backward and bidirectional pumping schemes, which have consult meaning for the suppression of thermal effects and the power scaling in Raman fiber lasers.

We comprehensively study the effects of temporal and spectral optimization on single-mode Raman fiber amplifiers. Amplified spontaneous emission sources and ytterbium-doped fiber lasers are employed as seed or pump lasers for comparison, and passive fibers are utilized as gain media. The influences of various parameters of the laser on 2nd order Raman threshold and maximum output power are investigated experimentally, including bandwidth, seed power, wavelength separation between pump and seed laser, and temporal stability. With the 190 m passive fiber, the output power increases from 99.5 W to 142.4 W, corresponding to 43.1% improvement through the optimization of seed laser power, pump wavelength and temporal performance of pump source in this amplifier, which has guidance on the establishment of high-power single-mode Raman fiber amplifiers.