Abstract

High power, high brightness fiber lasers have numerous potential commercial and military applications. These lasers offer unique flexibility as they may be coherently combined to provide a potential multi-kilowatt laser source and integrated delivery system. Fiber lasers with cladding pump designs represent a new generation of diode pumped configurations that are extremely efficient, have single mode output and may be operated with or without active cooling. They have a number of novel or unusual attributes, stemming from the fact that they represent the extreme case of a long gain length thin laser cavity. Reports indicate that over 100 watts of TEM₀₀ CW output power are readily demonstrated from current cladding pumped fiber laser designs. [1,2]

© 2001 Optical Society of America