High Power Laser Science and Engineering, (2018), Vol. 6, e28, 7 pages.
© The Author(s) 2018. 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.2018.22
Investigation on extreme frequency shift in silica
fiber-based high-power Raman fiber laser
Jiaxin Song, Hanshuo Wu, Jun Ye, Hanwei Zhang, Jiangming Xu, Pu Zhou, and Zejin Liu
College of Optoelectronic Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
(Received 29 January 2018; revised 9 March 2018; accepted 19 March 2018)
Abstract
In this paper, we experimentally investigated the extreme frequency shift in high-power Raman fiber laser (RFL). The
RFL was developed by using a pair of fiber Bragg gratings with fixed and matched central wavelength (1120 nm)
combined with a piece of 31-m-long polarization maintaining (PM) passive fiber adopted as Raman gain medium.
The pump source was a homemade high-power, linearly polarized (LP) wavelength-tunable master oscillator power
amplifier (MOPA) source with ∼25 nm tunable working range (1055–1080 nm). High-power and high-efficiency RFL
with extreme frequency shift between the pump and Stokes light was explored. It is found that frequency shift located
within 10.6 THz and 15.2 THz can ensure efficient Raman lasing, where the conversion efficiency is more than 95% of
the maximal value, 71.3%. In addition, a maximum output power of 147.1 W was obtained with an optical efficiency of
71.3%, which is the highest power ever reported in LP RFLs to the best of our knowledge.
Keywords: linearly polarized laser; Raman fiber laser; Raman gain spectrum
1. Introduction
Raman fiber laser (RFL) can theoretically achieve emission
at almost arbitrary wavelength with the help of proper
pump wavelength
[1]
; thus, the emission range of RFL is
much broader than lasers based on rare earth-doped fibers.
Therefore, RFL has been explored to achieve high-power
output at specialized wavelengths
[2–10]
, which are rather
challenging for lasing or amplifying efficiently by rare earth-
doped fibers
[11–13]
. To date, high-power RFLs have been
widely investigated and applied in optical pumping, fre-
quency conversion, optical communications, biology and
scientific research
[14–22]
. It is well known that the Raman
gain in silica fibers extends over a large frequency range up
to 40 THz
[23]
. In general, the frequency shift between pump
wavelength and Raman wavelength is approximately 13.2
or 14.7 THz corresponding to the double-peak structure of
Raman gain spectrum for silica fiber
[23, 24]
. The frequency
shift between the pump light and target Raman light is
usually designed to be well matched to fulfill the peaks
of Raman gain spectrum. For example, hundred-watt-level
high-power RFLs operating at 1120 nm and 1150 nm were
demonstrated by using 1070 nm and 1090 nm fiber lasers as
pump sources, respectively
[3, 17]
. It is to be noted that, for ap-
Correspondence to: P. Zhou, College of Optoelectronic Science and
Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, No. 109 Deya
Road, Changsha 410073, China. Email: zhoupu203@163.com
plication that requires RFLs with some specific wavelengths,
it is usually not easy to obtain high-power pump source. The
central wavelength of the pump source should match well
with a 13.2 THz frequency shift compared with the output
wavelength of RFL. For example, single mode 1178 nm
RFL, which can be used for frequency doubling to the
yellow, is often pumped by 1120 nm fiber laser. However, it
is relatively difficult to achieve high-power lasing at 1120 nm
based on Yb-doped fiber because of smaller net gain
[25–27]
compared with shorter wavelength
[28, 29]
. Therefore, it is
interesting to explore the feasibility of generating high-
power 1178 nm by pumping with a powerful Yb-doped fiber
laser (YDFL) operating at ∼1110 nm (or even shorter wave-
length) corresponding to the frequency shift of ∼15.6 THz,
which has a significant difference compared with 13.2 THz.
In fact, efficient lasing from a fiber Raman oscillator by fully
exploring the broadband gain spectrum was studied as early
as in 1977
[30, 31]
. In the visible band, tunable Raman oscilla-
tor pumped by a 4 W argon ion laser at 514.5 nm was tuned
over 8 nm using a prism, which corresponds to the frequency
shift from 6.2 to 14.9 THz. In the infrared band, Stokes
oscillation tuning from 1085 to 1130 nm corresponding to
the frequency shift of 5.5 to 16.5 THz was obtained pumped
by a 5 W Nd:YAG laser at 1064 nm. In 2008, Belanger
et al. demonstrated a widely tunable RFL, the frequency
shift of which ranged from 2.9 to 17.6 THz
[32]
. Almost
constant output Stokes power, up to 5.0 W, was obtained
1