Abstract

The advantages of high temporal stability, short coherence length and good beam quality have made the conventional low-power broadband fiber superfluorescent source to be an attractive device, which has found a vast range of applications in the area of gas sensing, low coherence interferometry and medical imaging. The combination of these characteristics with high output power also make it possible to be a novel high brightness light source with properties of both fiber superfluorescent source and conventional fiber laser for materials processing and metrology [1]. Here, we demonstrated the power scaling of narrow-linewidth thulium-doped all-fiber superfluorescent source with wavelength tunable from 1940 nm to 2020 nm based on MOPA configuration. The MOPA yielded 364 W superfluorescence output at central wavelength of 1990 nm with 3 dB spectral bandwidth of 2.1 nm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest power operation of a fiber superfluorescent source at 2 μm wavelength region.

© 2015 IEEE