Table of Contents
Overview of Fiber Lasers
Fiber lasers were first demonstrated in 1964 by Snitzer, and since then have experienced extensive research and development over the past couple of decades. The research into fiber laser technology has been fueled by numerous advantages that fiber lasers provide, as well as their superiority to bulk solid-state lasers; fiber lasers have not only motivated scientific study but have attracted significant commercial interest.
Key Benefits of Fiber Laser Systems
The benefits of fiber laser systems include the following.
- Efficient Heat Dissipation. The unique geometry of the fiber laser medium allows for efficient heat dissipation due to a ratio of surface area to the active volume being large. This benefits laser power scaling and makes thermal management easily attainable.
- Excellent Output Beam Quality. Due to the confinement of laser radiation in the fiber waveguide structure, the fiber laser beam quality is high.
- Compactness and Ruggedness. All-fiberized structure design of fiber lasers eliminates the need for complicated alignment of free-space optical components, thus resulting in a simplified laser architecture.
- Reduced Mode Distortion. Thermally induced mode distortion is often observed in traditional solid-state lasers; fiber lasers can significantly reduce mode distortion by a specific physical design of the fiber.
Recent Advancements in Fiber Laser Technology
The performance of fiber laser systems has been improving over the past 50 years due to significant scientific interest. The development of fiber materials, drawing technology, fiber component fabrication, etc., has led to an improvement of fiber lasers in several areas. Emission wavelength selection has been broadened and now includes a wide variety of lasers, from ultraviolet fiber lasers to mid-infrared lasers. An output power of 10 kW with nearly diffraction-limited beam quality has been achieved in continuous-wave fiber lasers; few-cycle light with a pulse duration shorter than 10 fs has been produced in femtosecond fiber lasers. All of these developments fuel the field of possible fiber laser applications and drive their practical employment.
Certain fields of fiber laser applications have been rapidly developing, such as high-precision metrology, gravitational wave detection, and coherent LIDAR; these fields require single-frequency fiber lasers. Single-frequency fiber lasers have gained significant attention and have been broadly researched recently.