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Technology Gives Fiber Lasers Ten Times More Power and High Beam Quality

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) team of six physicists has developed a new technology to improve high-power fiber lasers. Their technology, called Efficient Mode-Converters for High-Power Fiber Amplifiers, allows the power of fiber lasers to be increased while maintaining high beam quality. Currently, fiber lasers can produce tens of kilowatts of power. The conventional fiber laser design features a circular core and has fundamental limitations that make it impractical to allow higher laser power unless the core area is increased. LLNL researchers have introduced a design to increase the laser's core area along the axis of the ribbon fiber. The design makes it difficult to use a conventional laser beam, so the LLNL team converted the beam into a profile that propagates into the ribbon fiber and is converted back once it is amplified. The use of this new technology will permit the construction of higher power lasers for lower costs and increase the power of fiber lasers from tens of kilowatts of power to about 100 kilowatts and higher.

Topics:
Fiber Optics Lasers & Laser Systems Photonics Power

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    Transcript

    00:00:05 we had done a previous study that looked at the power scalability of fiber lasers and established that they had limits in the 20 to 30 kilowatt realm highest average power that's ever be gotten from the fiber laser ring around 10 kilowatts that that record was set four or five years ago it hasn't changed since our belief was that you could go much higher in power for things like directed energy

    00:00:36 weapons and for machining welding cutting at high rates of speed in industrial type applications to go from a round traditional round fiber like they use in the telecom world to something that's more like a slab or rectangular geometry part of our rd 100 was showing that we could use diffractive optical and it's efficient would take that that beam that doesn't

    00:01:06 look very good but actually has very well known characteristics and converted efficient way back to a round very folks or deed one of the things we hope to do with this is a seeming success of those types of things really extend the range cutting a welding increase the speed and rate of of cutting welding and directed energy increase the range of the other

    00:01:30 systems we deploy