Coherent Propagation of Laser Beams in MCF Fibers

Abstract

The successful development of fiber-optic technologies in recent decades has stimulated research on the replacement of components of solid-state laser systems with fiber components, which can drastically change the attractiveness of the corresponding applied developments. Yielding on the energy characteristics of solid-state systems, fiber lasers and nonlinear optical devices have high efficiency of conversion of pump energy to radiation energy associated with waveguide geometry, high quality of the spatial profile of the laser beam, as well as low cost, compactness, lack of alignment in work process. Note that the maximum achievable radiation power in a single fiber is limited primarily by the process of self-focusing, which leads to fiber damage. The use of a multi-core fiber (MCF), consisting of identical equidistant weakly coupled optical fibers, makes it possible to realize initially coherent propagation of laser radiation with a total power noticeably higher than it can be transmitted in a single optical fiber. However, as theoretical and experimental studies have shown, such systems have its own critical power (Balakin et al., 2016) whereby the self-focusing of the quasihomogeneous distribution of the wave field and its separation into a set of incoherent structures occurs. Therefore, we have considered a small-sized optical system of 2N identical weakly coupled optical fibers arranged in a ring (Balakin et. al., 2018). In such systems, it is possible to find stable distributions of intense wave beams, which allow coherent radiation transport over long distances. The total radiation power in the found distributions can significantly (up to 2N times) exceed the critical self-focusing power in continuous media. This manifests itself most clearly for the distribution of un ~ (-1)n with antiphase fields in neighboring waveguides, which is stable at an arbitrary wave beam power. Direct numerical simulation of a nonlinear wave equation confirms the stability of the field distributions found. The research was supported by the RAS Presidium Program «Nonlinear dynamics: fundamental problems and applications».