Abstract:
Background Fiber lasers have gained extensive adoption across medical, telecommunications, industrial processing, and defense sectors owing to their exceptional beam quality, operational stability, compact architecture, and high reliability. Among them, narrow-linewidth linearly polarized fiber lasers have become a key research focus due to their outstanding spectral purity and coherence, with current efforts concentrated on further scaling their output power and brightness.
Purpose In this work, we demonstrate a 5.09 kW narrow-linewidth linearly polarized fiber laser system designed to overcome stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) and transverse mode instability (TMI).
Methods A white-noise radio frequency phase modulation scheme is implemented to broaden the seed laser spectrum into a Gaussian profile with an 89 GHz full width at half maximum, enabling effective SBS suppression. A polarization-maintaining ytterbium-doped fiber (PMYDF) with low numerical aperture (about 0.05), large mode area (about 237 μm2), and high birefringence coefficient (4.23×10−4) is employed to simultaneously mitigate SBS and intermodal thermal coupling.
Results The system achieves 5.09 kW output power while maintaining an 89 GHz spectral linewidth, polarization extinction ratio above 19.6 dB, and beam quality factor of M2 < 1.2. No self-pulsing or temporal instability is observed at maximum power, confirming suppression of both SBS and TMI.
Conclusions By employing a white-noise radio frequency signal to modulate the phase of a single-frequency laser, the SBS effect in high-power fiber laser systems is effectively suppressed. Concurrently, intermodal thermal coupling and SBS are further mitigated using a fabricated low-numerical-aperture, large-mode-area PMYDF. The demonstrated performance supports the feasibility of high-power, narrow-linewidth polarized fiber lasers for long-term stable operation.
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