Abstract

Numerous applications in metrology, telecommunication, medicine and material processing require highly efficient and powerful yet reliable laser sources with excellent beam quality. In recent years, our group has focused on the development of rare earth doped glass fibre lasers pumped by commonly available near infrared laser diodes to provide laser sources meeting these requirements [1,2]. Any desired laser beam quality can be imposed by designing the waveguide structure of the fibre appropriately. Furthermore, using a double clad fibre design permits a power scaling almost exclusively limited by the output power of the available pump sources: the properties of an outer cladding are optimised in view of an efficient incoupling of the pump laser diode light.

© 1998 IEEE