Cascaded combiners for a high power CW fiber laser

Abstract

We report cascaded combiners for a high power continuous wave (CW) fiber laser in this paper. The cascaded combiners are fabricated with an improved lateral splicing process. During the fusing process, there is no stress or tension between the pump fiber and the double-cladding fiber. Thus, the parameters of the combiner are better than those that have been reported. The coupling efficiency is 98.5%, and the signal insertion loss is 1%. The coupling efficiency of the cascaded combiners is 97.5%. The pump lights are individually coupled into the double-cladding fiber via five combiners. The thermal effects cannot cause damage to the combiners and the cascaded combiners can operate stably in high power CW fiber lasers. We also develop a high power CW fiber laser that generates a maximum 780 W of CW signal power at 1080 nm with 71% optical-to-optical conversion efficiency. The fiber laser is pumped via five intra-cavity cascaded combiners and five extra-cavity cascaded combiners with a maximum pump power of 1096 W and a pump wavelength of 975 nm.