Abstract

Fiber and bulk lasers form two distinct classes of solid-state laser, both of which have achieved tremendous success in various arenas, but they are not without their limitations. The long, thin geometry of a fiber allows excellent heat dissipation, which combined with a waveguiding structure provides stronger resilience to thermally-induced mode distortions than in bulk lasers, allowing diffraction-limited single-mode operation at multi-kW power levels in continuous-wave mode. However, the threshold for deleterious non-linear effects and laser-induced damage in fibers is generally much lower than bulk systems, owing to very tight beam confinement over a long interaction length, placing stringent limitations on pulsed performance in fibers.

© 2017 IEEE