Unlike traditional silica-based fibers, ZBLAN fibers possess exceptionally low phonon energy, making them ideal for transmitting signals in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) range. This characteristic is particularly significant because the mid-IR range harbors a wealth of information about molecular structures, enabling applications in environmental monitoring, medical diagnostics, and chemical sensing. However, to fully unlock the midIR capabilities of those fibers, we need to demonstrate repeatable procedures for handling these fibers, such as efficient connections between silica and ZBLAN fibers and between ZBLAN and ZBLAN fibers doped and passive ones.
Working with soft-glass fibers such as ZBLAN fibers, it is required to have precise control of the thermal splicing conditions. This paper extensively investigates the splicing thermal conditions using the Vytran GPX-3400 system to achieve controllable and low-loss thermal splicing between ZBLAN to ZBLAN and ZBLAN to silica fibers. The temperature information in the filament was monitored using a silica FBG sensor by adjusting the Power, the splicing duration, and airflow of the Argon gas, and the calibration curves were extracted.
We numerically investigated the properties of diffraction gratings designated for fabrication on the facet of an optical fiber. The gratings are intended to be used in high-power fiber lasers as mirrors either with a low or high reflectivity. The modal reflectance of low reflectivity polarizing grating has a value close to 3% for TE mode while it is significantly suppressed for TM mode. Such a grating can be fabricated on laser output fiber facet. The polarizing grating with high modal reflectance is designed as a leaky-mode resonant diffraction grating. The grating can be etched in a thin layer of high index dielectric which is sputtered on fiber facet. We used refractive index of Ta2O5for such a layer. We found that modal reflectance can be close to 0.95 for TE polarization and polarization extinction ratio achieves 18 dB. Rigorous coupled wave analysis was used for fast optimization of grating parameters while aperiodic rigorous coupled wave analysis, Fourier modal method and finite difference time domain method were compared and used to compute modal reflectance of designed gratings.
We investigated behaviours of 1D binary diffraction gratings fabricated on optical fiber facets. Only sub-wavelength structures were considered to suppress higher diffraction orders. The aperiodic rigorous coupled wave analysis, the Fourier modal method and the finite-difference time-domain numerical methods were used to compute and optimize the modal reflectance of the investigated structures. Optimized gratings were milled on fiber facets by focused ion beam. One of the gratings was tested in a thulium-doped fiber laser where it acted as a low re ectivity polarizing output mirror. A slope efficiency of the laser and a beam quality parameter were conserved while lasing threshold slightly increased.
Mid-infrared laser absorption spectroscopy (LAS) is useful for molecular trace gas concentration measurements in gas mixtures. While the gas chromatography-mass spectrometry is still the gold standard in gas analysis, LAS offers several advantages. It takes tens of minutes for a gas mixture to be separated in the capillary column precluding gas chromatography from real-time control of industrial processes, while LAS can measure the concentration of gas species in seconds. LAS can be used in a wide range of applications such as gas quality screening for regulation, metering and custody transfer,1 purging gas pipes to avoid explosions,1 monitoring combustion processes,2 detection and quantification of gas leaks,3 by-products monitoring to provide feedback for the real-time control of processes in petrochemical industry,4 real-time control of inductively coupled plasma etch reactors,5, 6 and medical diagnostics by means of time-resolved volatile organic compound (VOC) analysis in exhaled breath.7 Apart from the concentration, it also permits us to determine the temperature, pressure, velocity and mass flux of the gas under observation. The selectivity and sensitivity of LAS is linked to a very high spectral resolution given by the linewidth of single-frequency lasers. Measurements are performed at reduced pressure where the collisional and Doppler broadenings are balanced. The sensitivity can be increased to ppb and sometimes to ppt ranges by increasing the interaction length in multi-pass gas cells or resonators and also by adopting modulation techniques.8
High-power Tm-doped fiber lasers are greatly suitable for various applications, such as material processing, medicine, environmental monitoring and topography. In this work we present an all-fiber narrowband CW laser in near fundamental mode operation based on a Tm-doped double-clad active fiber pumped by 793 nm laser diodes with a central wavelength stabilized at 2039 nm by a fiber Bragg grating. The achieved output power is 60 W with a slope efficiency of 46%. The measured beam quality factor is less than 1.4. Further increasing of the output power is possible using various power scaling techniques, for example, coherent combination of several Tm-doped fiber lasers. The developed fiber laser could be employed for welding, cutting and marking of thermoplastics in industry, minimally invasive surgery in medicine or sensors in lidar systems. Future improvements of thulium fiber lasers are possible due to the extremely wide gain-bandwidth of the active medium and the rapid growth of 2-μm fiber components production.
In this work, we present experimental results of characterization of the developed holmium-doped silica-based optical fibers with holmium ions concentrations in the range from 1000 to 10000 ppm. The fibers were fabricated by the modified chemical vapor deposition and solution doping method. They were characterized in terms of their spectral attenuation, refractive index profile, and especially performance in fiber laser. Simultaneously, two different fiber laser setups were tested. In the first one, holmium-doped fiber in Fabry-Perot configuration was pumping by in house developed thulium-doped fiber laser in ring arrangement. In the second one, bulk-optic pump-coupling configuration, consisted of a commercially available thulium fiber laser emitting at 1940 nm and system of lenses and mirrors was used. We have focused on comparison of laser output powers, slope efficiencies, and laser thresholds for individual holmiumdoped fiber in these different laser arrangements. Finally, the application of the developed fiber in subpicosecond fiber laser with graphene-based saturable absorber for mode-locking operation was investigated.
In this paper we present experimental results of characterization of the experimentally prepared thulium-doped optical fibers in double-clad hexagonal fiber geometry for cladding optical pumping at a wavelength of 793 nanometers. The fiber was fabricated by the modified chemical vapor deposition and solution doping method and coated with polymer with lower refractive index than silica. The fiber was characterized in views of its refractive index profiles, thulium ions concentration, spectral absorptions, fluorescence lifetime, and performance in fiber laser.
In our contribution we report novel mode field adapter incorporated inside bundled tapered pump and signal combiner. Pump and signal combiners are crucial component of contemporary double clad high power fiber lasers. Proposed combiner allows simultaneous matching to single mode core on input and output. We used advanced optimization techniques to match the combiner to a single mode core simultaneously on input and output and to minimalize losses of the combiner signal branch. We designed two arrangements of combiners’ mode field adapters. Our numerical simulations estimates losses in signal branches of optimized combiners of 0.23 dB for the first design and 0.16 dB for the second design for SMF-28 input fiber and SMF-28 matched output double clad fiber for the wavelength of 2000 nm. The splice losses of the actual combiner are expected to be even lower thanks to dopant diffusion during the splicing process.
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