Abstract

High-average-power lasers with diffraction-limited beam quality are desired by many applications such as cutting, welding and drilling. Cladding-pumped rare-earth-doped fiber lasers offer an excellent combination of compactness, high efficiency, and very good beam quality. Large output power is possible because of the excellent thermal dissipation properties of fibers; up to 10kW of output power in continuous-wave (CW) mode has been demonstrated in a single transverse mode. However, it’s very hard to scale the output power with a single-aperture laser system. scientist made a study on the output power of fiber lasers, which showed the maximum output power of fiber lasers, which showed the maximum output power of fiber lasers with the diffraction limit of 36.6kW for wide bandwidth and 1.86kW for narrow bandwidth, respectively. Other scaling approaches should be taken into closer consideration. In recent years, the technologies of beam combination is the hot research topic, The spectral beam combination (SBC) ,incoherent and coherent beam combination can not only offer the high output power, but also retain or improve the beam quality.

© 2014 Optical Society of America