Side-pump combiner for all-fiber monolithic fiber lasers and amplifiers

Abstract

A fiber side-pump combiner is presented. This pump combiner does not interrupt the core of the active fiber, thus allowing for monolithic fiber lasers and amplifiers. Using one of these devices, the power coming from seven pump diodes was combined and a maximum of 86 W was coupled in an active fiber. An similar to 30 W laser using this side-pumping concept was also demonstrated

High-Power Passive Fiber Components for All-Fiber Lasers and Amplifiers Application—Design and Fabrication

“…Presented in our previous work [53] power combiner requiring TR twice as large as presented power combiner in [51], had BR below 1, which indicates losses resulting from the tapering of the input fiber bundle from the initial 375 µm diameter to the diameter of the output DC fiber (125 µm). Using input and output fibers with much larger clad diameters [51,52,[54][55][56][57] helps to maintain high beam brightness and achieve handling of a very large amount of pump power. In a paper [55] two configurations of power combiners are presented: 3 × 1 and 7 × 1 capable to handle approximately 2.1 kW and 4.72 kW, respectively.…”

40 W All-Fiber Er/Yb MOPA System Using Self-Fabricated High-Power Passive Fiber Components

“…Construction with bulk optics [7] LMA The most important components of all-fiber construction techniques of high-power sources are mode field adaptors (MFAs) and fiber power combiners [20][21][22][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. MFAs enable signal transmission between two fibers with different mode-field diameters.…”

“…A splice between non-matched fibers can cause leaking of high power radiation, leading to point overheating and even damaging the fiber and the setup. It is often a problem to match commercial components to the fibers used in the experimental setup, which is still under investigation by many research teams [20][21][22][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. It is important to achieve a low transmission loss of the pump radiation, but most of all, it is essential to achieve a very low transmission loss of the signal radiation, which is more expensive than pump radiation (according to price per W).…”

Fabrication of high-efficiency pump and signal combiner based on a thermally expanded core technique

“…[6][7][8]. The other one manages to couple light from the side, is a promising approach, called a side-pump technique which is difficult in making the coupling structure with high proficiency and reliability [9][10][11].…”