Fiber Lasers

The advantages of cladding pumping fiber lasers were identified early in the research era of fiber laser technology. Essentially, fiber lasers allow efficient brightness conversion from the broad area pump laser diode into a single-mode diffraction limited beam, defined by the waveguide properties of the fiber’s core. In the past three years there has been a dramatic increase in power delivered from a single fiber laser with near diffraction limited beam quality (see figure 1), allowing fiber lasers to compete directly with high power Nd-YAG and disk lasers. Two major technological developments enabled this power-scaling revolution: the emergence of mode-size scaling techniques used in conjunction with cladding-pumped Ytterbium-doped fibers and the rapid advances in available powers and brightness of diode laser pumps.