Dysprosium-Doped Chalcogenide Master Oscillator Power Amplifier (MOPA) for Mid-IR Emission

Abstract

International audienceThe paper describes the design of a medium infrared fiber laser based on a dysprosium-doped chalcogenide glass Dy3+ : Ga5Ge20Sb10S65. To obtain a high efficiency, the fiber laser is followed by an optical amplifier. The optimized optical source exploits a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) configuration. The MOPA pump and signal wavelengths are 1709 and 4384 nm, respectively. Spectroscopic parameters measured on preliminary samples of chalcogenide glasses are taken into account to fulfill realistic simulations. The MOPA emission is maximized by applying a particle swarm optimization approach. For the dysprosium concentration 6 x 10(25) ions/m(3) and the input pump power of 3 W, an output power of 637 mW can be obtained for optical fiber losses close to 1 dB m(-1). The optimized MOPA configuration allows a laser efficiency larger than 21%. By considering the high beam quality provided by photonic crystal fibers, it is a good candidate for medium infrared light generation whose main applications include, but are not limited to, molecular spectroscopy and environmental monitoring

Modelling and Design of Lanthanide Ion-Doped Chalcogenide Fiber Lasers: Progress towards the Practical Realization of the First MIR Chalcogenide Fiber Laser

“…More recent studies have concentrated on the improvement of the lasing efficiency, while finding alternatives to the cascade pumping scheme [29][30][31][32]. In [31], use of dual pump was proposed to bring the lasing efficiency above 20%.…”

“…A photonic crystal fiber was proposed to enforce single-mode operation and pump and signal wavelengths. A practical realization of a laser cavity with two pump lasers may prove challenging; therefore, an alternative solution was presented in [32], which makes it possible to improve the laser efficiency with much less challenge with respect to practical realization. By combining a master oscillator with a power amplifier ( Figure 6) and using 1700 nm pump only, a slope efficiency as high as 38% can be achieved.…”

Advances in Mid-IR Fiber Lasers: Tellurite, Fluoride and Chalcogenide

“…However, the long lifetime of the lower laser manifold and the low pump absorption rate are the two major drawbacks limiting the lasing efficiency. In [34], a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) configuration, exploiting direct pumping in the upper laser manifold at λ p = 1.7 µm, was proposed to reuse the unabsorbed pump power to boost the output signal power by means of an additional amplifying stage. The set-up is shown in Figure 8.…”

“…Dy 3+ ions in chalcogenide glass have also been extensively investigated [8][9][10][11]13,34,35] in order to obtain laser emission in the wavelength range Δλ between λ = 4.1 μm and λ = 4.6 μm by exploiting the 6 H11/2 → 6 H13/2 transition. However, the long lifetime of the lower laser manifold and the low pump absorption rate are the two major drawbacks limiting the lasing efficiency.…”

Determining the refractive index dispersion and thickness of hot-pressed chalcogenide thin films from an improved Swanepoel method

“…The properties of mid-infrared (MIR) transparency, high refractive index, low phonon energy, high optical non-linearity (Zakery and Elliott 2003), and an ability to doped them with rare-earth element ions (Sanghera and Aggarwal 1999;Sanghera et al 2009;Tang et al 2015;Falconi et al 2016), make chalcogenide glasses attractive for use in planar photonic integrated circuits (Seddon et al 2006Abdel-Moneim et al 2015), and narrow-and broad-band fibre-based laser sources (Petersen et al 2014) and amplifiers (Hu et al 2015;Falconi et al 2017) for the MIR. Although much research effort has been paid to the development and characterisation of chalcogenide glasses for photonics, relatively little refractive index dispersion data are presently available at MIR wavelengths, see for example: Orava et al (2009), Qiao et al (2011), Dantanarayana et al (2014), Gleason et al (2016), Wang et al (2017) and references therein.…”