High-power, fixed, and tunable wavelength, grating-free cascaded Raman fiber lasers

Abstract

Cascaded Raman lasers enable high powers at various wavelength bands inaccessible with conventional rare-earth-doped lasers. The input and output wavelengths of conventional implementations are fixed by the constituent fiber gratings necessary for cascaded Raman conversion. We demonstrate here a simple architecture for high-power, fixed, and wavelength tunable, grating-free, cascaded Raman conversion between different wavelength bands. The architecture is based on the recently proposed distributed feedback Raman lasers. Here, we implement a module which converts the ytterbium band to the eye-safe 1.5 μm region. We demonstrate pump-limited output powers of over 30 W in fixed and continuously wavelength tunable configurations.