Abstract

In the past years rare-earth-doped fiber lasers have emerged as attractive and power scalable solid-state laser concept due to the outstanding thermo-optical properties of an actively doped fiber. The large ratio of surface to active volume of such a fiber ensures excellent heat dissipation, furthermore the beam quality is defined by the refractive index profile of the active core and is therefore independent on the pump power. Fiber lasers and amplifiers offer a very high single-pass gain and therefore low laser thresholds and efficient diode-pumped operation. Using advanced fiber designs, in continuous-wave (cw) operation output powers exceeding the 10 kW-level with diffraction-limited beam quality have been demonstrated. In the pulsed regime average powers in the order of several hundred Watt even for few cycle pulses based on fiber lasers have been reported.

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