Abstract

Fiber lasers and amplifiers have a great potential for many applications in different areas of technology. Various configurations of CW , mode-locked , Q-switched or single-frequency lasers have been reported offering a large variety in performance characteristics. Apart from the use of active fibers as the gain media in the traditional configurations based on concepts developed for bulk lasers, it has appeared that the unique and rather special properties of fiber lasers, like the high single pass gain and in particular numerous nonlinear effects in optical fiber waveguides, have yet to be exploited in novel configurations of fiber lasers.

© 1996 Optical Society of America