High Power Laser Science and Engineering, (2019), Vol. 7, e27, 8 pages.
© The Author(s) 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.2019.13
High-peak-power temporally shaped nanosecond fiber
laser immune to SPM-induced spectral broadening
Rongtao Su
1,2,3
, Pengfei Ma
1,2,3
, Pu Zhou
1,2,3
, Zilun Chen
1,2,3
, Xiaolin Wang
1,2,3
, Yanxing Ma
1,2,3
,
Jian Wu
1,2,3
, and Xiaojun Xu
1,2,3
1
College of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
2
State Key Laboratory of Pulsed Power Laser Technology, Changsha 410073, China
3
Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of High Energy Laser Technology, Changsha 410073, China
(Received 20 November 2018; revised 22 February 2019; accepted 21 March 2019)
Abstract
High-peak-power transform-limited narrow-linewidth nanosecond all-fiber lasers are desired in a range of applications.
However, their linewidths will be broadened by self-phase modulation (SPM). We propose a novel concept that generates
transform-limited laser pulses by temporally shaping the pulse seed. The impact of the pulse shape on SPM-induced
spectral broadening was studied numerically and experimentally. It was found theoretically that the square-shape
pulsed laser is immune to SPM-induced spectral broadening. Based on this principle, we built a high-peak-power,
linearly polarized, square-shape nanosecond all-fiber laser in a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) configuration.
Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) limited peak powers of 4.02 kW, 5.06 kW, 6.52 kW and 9.30 kW were obtained at
pulse widths of 8 ns, 7 ns, 6 ns and 5 ns. Thanks to the square-shape pulsed seed, the linewidths at maximum peak power
remained at 129.5 MHz, 137.6 MHz, 156.2 MHz and 200.1 MHz, respectively, close to the transform-limited values of
110.8 MHz, 126.6 MHz, 147.7 MHz and 177.3 MHz.
Keywords: fiber laser; nanosecond pulsed laser; narrow linewidth; self-phase modulation; stimulated Brillouin scattering
1. Introduction
High-power narrow-linewidth nanosecond lasers are desired
in a range of applications such as coherent LIDAR
[1, 2]
and nonlinear frequency conversion
[3–5]
. All-fiber mono-
lithic configuration, which has the unique advantages of
robustness, compactness and low maintenance, can offer a
perfect solution to those applications. High-power narrow-
linewidth fiber lasers are mostly based on the master oscil-
lator power amplifier (MOPA) architecture, which typically
consists of a low- or medium-power laser seed followed
by one or several high-power fiber amplifiers
[6–9]
. Pulsed
laser seeds with transform-limited linewidths can be gen-
erated by directly Q-switching a distributed Bragg reflec-
tor single-frequency fiber laser
[10, 11]
or modulating a CW
single-frequency fiber laser
[12, 13]
. The power-scaling of
the narrow-linewidth fiber amplifier is mainly limited by
stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS)
[14, 15]
. Over the past
decade, many techniques have been employed to mitigate
SBS and increase the output power, such as using large
Correspondence to: P. Zhou, No. 109 Deya Road, Changsha 410073,
China. Email: zhoupu203@163.com
mode area (LMA) and/or highly doped active fiber
[1, 12]
,
imposing thermal and/or strain distributions
[16–18]
, and de-
signing acoustic wave tailored fibers
[19, 20]
. In the pulsed
regime, the SBS threshold also depends on the pulse width
because the response of the medium in the SBS case is
governed by a phonon lifetime of several nanoseconds
[21, 22]
.
By using highly Tm-doped germanate fiber with a length
of ∼25 cm, narrow-linewidth nanosecond fiber lasers with
33 kW peak powers have been obtained
[12]
.
The spectral linewidth of laser pulses broadens in fiber
amplifiers because of self-phase modulation (SPM), which
degrades the coherence of the laser and influences its perfor-
mance. For example, the linewidth of a 1 kW peak power
pulsed laser broadened from 50 MHz to 150 MHz after
propagating in 3 m long SMF-28 fiber
[10]
. In order to reduce
the undesired SPM, a promising way is using LMA and/or
highly doped active fiber
[12, 23]
. For fiber laser systems
including longer passive fibers, SPM-induced spectral broad-
ening cannot be neglected
[10]
. Since the spectral broadening
is induced by a time-dependent nonlinear phase shift, it can
be eliminated if the nonlinear phase shift is compensated by
phase modulation of the laser. However, a complex phase
1