High Power Laser Science and Engineering, (2019), Vol. 7, e15, 7 pages.
© The Author 2019. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
doi:10.1017/hpl.2018.76
High-brightness all-fiber Raman lasers directly pumped
by multimode laser diodes
S. A. Babin
1,2
1
Institute of Automation and Electrometry, SB RAS, Novosibirsk 630090, Russia
2
Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk 630090, Russia
(Received 8 November 2018; revised 15 December 2018; accepted 20 December 2018)
Abstract
High-brightness fiber laser sources usually utilize active rare-earth-doped fibers cladding-pumped by multimode laser
diodes (LDs), but they operate in limited wavelength ranges. Singlemode-passive-fiber based Raman lasers are able to
operate at almost any wavelength being pumped by high-power fiber lasers. One of the interesting possibilities is to
directly pump graded-index (GRIN) multimode passive fibers by available high-power multimode LDs at 915–940 nm,
thus achieving high-power Raman lasing in the wavelength range of 950–1000 nm, which is problematic for rare-earth-
doped fiber lasers. Here we review the latest results on the development of all-fiber high-brightness LD-pumped sources
based on GRIN fiber with in-fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs). The mode-selection properties of FBGs inscribed by fs pulses
supported by the Raman clean-up effect result in efficient conversion of multimode pump into a high-quality output beam
at 9xx nm. GRIN fibers with core diameters 62.5, 85 and 100 µm are compared. Further scaling capabilities and potential
applications of such sources are discussed.
Keywords: beam cleaning; fiber laser; high brightness; laser diode pumping; Raman laser
1. Introduction
High-brightness fiber laser sources based on active rare-
earth (RE)-doped fibers are characterized by excellent out-
put characteristics and unique performance enabling their
wide use for scientific and industrial applications
[1]
. How-
ever, they operate at specific wavelengths defined by the
dopant gain bandwidth that limits their application range.
Singlemode-passive-fiber based Raman lasers are able to
operate at almost any wavelength defined by the pump
wavelength, Stokes shift and number of cascades at Raman
conversion
[2]
. Raman fiber lasers (RFLs) are usually pumped
into the singlemode-passive-fiber core by RE-doped fiber
lasers operating in singlemode regime with fundamental
transverse mode output. Using for pumping the most pow-
erful Yb-doped fiber laser (YDFL) operating around 1 µm,
it is possible to obtain Raman lasing almost in the whole
transmission window of silica fibers (1–2 µm), thanks to
the efficient cascaded generation of higher-order Stokes
components. In their turn, high-power RE-doped fiber lasers
are usually cladding-pumped by multimode (MM) laser
diodes (LDs). Such a complex pumping scheme leads to a
rather complicated design of RFLs. An interesting possibility
Correspondence to: S. A. Babin, Institute of Automation and Electrom-
etry, SB RAS, Novosibirsk 630090, Russia. Email: babin@iae.nsk.su
to simplify the RFL design is its direct pumping by cheap
and reliable high-power MM LDs, similar to the LD-pumped
RE-doped fiber lasers
[1]
. Though it is possible to employ
cladding pumping, this technique requires the development
of special double-clad passive fibers. In this way, Raman
lasing at 1120 nm with output power of 100 W and beam-
quality parameter M
2
∼ 1.6 was demonstrated with an MM
YDFL as a pump source
[3]
, whereas at direct diode pumping
only 6 W output power was obtained by the same group
[4]
.
From technical and economical points of view, it is at-
tractive to use standard graded-index (GRIN) MM fibers
which are widely used in telecom. In this case, one can
directly couple the MM radiation of high-power LDs into
the MM GRIN-fiber core. In addition, using commercially
available MM LDs with operating wavelengths of 915–
940 nm, it is possible to obtain high-power Raman lasing in
the wavelength range of 950–1000 nm, which is problematic
for RE-doped fiber lasers. At the same time, output beam
quality of the MM RFL may be high enough due to the
beam clean-up effect at Raman conversion of continuous
wave (CW) radiation in GRIN fibers
[5, 6]
. Since the power
of commercial 9xx-nm LDs exceeds 100 W level for a single
unit pigtailed by a 105-µm core fiber, the MM RFL with
direct LD pumping became feasible.
1