Role of Interionic Processes in the Efficiency and Operation of Erbium-Doped Fluoride Fiber Lasers

New energy-transfer upconversion process in Er^3+:ZBLAN mid-infrared fiber lasers

“…These values were used extensively in the literature until recently when a new, "weakly interacting" (WI) approach was introduced by Gorjan et al [6] and later extended by Li and Jackson [15]. The WI approach asserts that ET processes are considerably weaker in ZBLAN fibers than in bulk glass, with values on the order of 5 × 10 −19 cm 3 /s.…”

“…Energy transfer parameters relevant to this work, which fall in between values found in literature, were interpolated (*) or extrapolated ( ‡) according to the curves provided in [5,15]. Recent numerical analysis based on the WI approach has been successful in reproducing experimental results that could not be explained using an SI-based numerical analysis in ZBLAN fiber lasers [6,15,17,18]. During our spectroscopic investigations, both sets of parameters were used where applicable and the results compared.…”

“…Three energy exchange processes between erbium ions have been extensively investigated because they affect the performance of the commonly used erbium ion lasing transitions [5,6]. The exchange processes are: 4 Figure 1 shows all considered spectroscopic processes.…”

Simple and efficient method of lines based algorithm for modeling of erbium doped Q-switched fluoride fiber lasers

“…The design of fluoride glass based erbium doped fiber lasers has therefore attracted significant attention. Several models were developed for modelling erbium doped fluoride fiber lasers and amplifiers [9][10][11][12][13][14]. These laser models rely on solving the rate equations and the propagation equations for the pump and signal waves in the time domain and are closely related to models used for time domain simulations of Q-switched silica glass based fiber lasers [15] and Raman fiber amplifiers [16].…”

“…These laser models rely on solving the rate equations and the propagation equations for the pump and signal waves in the time domain and are closely related to models used for time domain simulations of Q-switched silica glass based fiber lasers [15] and Raman fiber amplifiers [16]. In [9][10][11][12][13][14] the partial differential equations (PDEs) that describe the propagation of forward and backward travelling waves for the pump and signal in these models were reduced to a set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) using the method of characteristics (MOC). However, for MOC the spatial and temporal step ratio is fixed and has to be kept at a constant value equal to the optical wave group velocity for the transient results to preserve their physical meaning.…”