Recent achievements




The adoption of high power fiber lasers as an industrial material processing tool has been ongoing for several years and is now expanding into other markets including the medical and scientific markets. One key enhancement enabling penetration into the scientific market has been the improvements in high finesse fiber amplifiers, which are now capable of delivering single frequency linewidths (<5 kHz) together with excellent beam quality and stable linearly polarized output. Systems meeting these specifications have steadily progressed in the last few years from a few watts of output power, initially to the tens of watts and now into the hundreds of watts power level. This power scaling has been achieved with developments in the fiber technology, such as the adoption of stimulated brillouin scattering (SBS) suppression/mitigation techniques within the fiber, along with improvements in the overall amplifier design including large mode area (LMA) fibers with a low-aperture core, micro-structured rod-type fiber helical core, or chirally-coupled core fibers, and tapered double-clad fibers (T-DCF). The latest generation of high finesse, high power and pulsed fiber amplifiers now deliver power levels exceeding what is available from commercial solid-state single frequency sources and are opening up new scientific applications as a result of the higher power levels and stable optimized performance.

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