Abstract

In the last decade, research in high energy, short duration, pulsed fibre laser systems has yielded significant advances that have allowed fibre laser systems to increasingly dominate the commercial sector in laser machining, as well as in medical sensing, imaging, and spectroscopy [1]. Users of these products look for a number of qualities. High energy and short pulse duration are fundamentally important. Other design objectives include beam quality, wall plug efficiency, and thermal stability. However, as laser products move into areas of wider application, end users require more general specifications like hands off interfacing which doesn’t require expert knowledge, and environmental stability to ensure the laser continues to operate with longevity without maintenance or power/wavelength perturbations. We have recently demonstrated robust, passively mode-locked fibre laser designs that achieve these goals [2]. These devices use nonlinear amplifying loop mirrors (NALMs) for mode-locking, which allows for integrated all-fibre, all-polarisation maintaining (PM) cavity configurations that are inherently stable against environmental perturbations. However, so far operation has only been demonstrated around 1030 nm, whereas several applications demand access to other spectral regions. The 1060 nm range is of particular interest due to applications relying on solid-state Nd:YAG devices.

© 2015 IEEE