Abstract

Advances in cladding-pumped fiber lasers and amplifiers over the last two decades have been dramatic, leading to unprecedented levels of performance in terms of output power, efficiency, beam quality and wavelength coverage. These achievements have attracted growing interest within the community and have fuelled thoughts that fiber-based sources may one day replace conventional “bulk” solid-state lasers in many application areas. The main attractions of cladding-pumped fiber sources are derived directly from their geometry, which simultaneously allows very efficient generation of coherent light with relative immunity from the effects of heat generation, which are so detrimental to the performance of other types of lasers.

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