Power-scaling of erbium 3/μ m-laser
AssigneeCeramOptec Industries, Inc.
InventorsAndreas Diening, Thomas Sandrock
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A diode pumped fiber laser is described that utilizes highly erbium-doped fluoride glass to produce 1 W and higher outputs at about 3 μm. High dopant concentrations in fluoride glass make it possible to efficiently pump the laser around 975 nm which in turn leads to higher slope efficiencies for the laser. Furthermore, by using this pumping wavelength, saturation of laser output due to bleaching of the ground state is overcome. The fluoride glass composition is a modified version of the standard ZBLAN composition. This altered composition achieves high glass quality, enables fiber drawing, and avoids the problem of crystallization.
Claims7
An erbium fiber laser, comprising:
- a fiber having an active area, a first cladding, at least a portion of which surrounds said active area, and a second cladding, wherein a refractive index of said active area is higher than a refractive index of said first cladding, whose refractive index in turn is higher than that of said second cladding;
- reflective elements to create a resonating cavity within a selected length of said fiber;
- and
- a source of pumping radiation optically coupled to said fiber for delivering said pumping radiation to said active core to stimulate a laser emission from said resonating cavity;
- wherein said active area and at least said first cladding comprising a heavy metal fluoride glass composition;
- wherein said active area has only one active material dopant in its fluoride glass composition;
- said active material dopant is erbium, being present at least at 5 molar %;
- and
- wherein said laser emission is in the middle infrared spectral region, having a wavelength of around 3 μm, and said pumping radiation has a wavelength of about 970 nm.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.