“Active tapered fiber technology: from retrospective to prospective”
Fiber lasers have already gained an excellent reputation due to a number of features such as good beam quality, high plug-in efficiency, stability and compactness. However, there is a constant demand for advanced performance. We explore a special active fiber technology featuring of complex longitudinal profile, which enables compact design and flexible operational regime in high-power laser systems. An active tapered double-clad fiber is capable of amplifying light with an elevated threshold for classical nonlinear effects or high spectral brightness, preserving good beam quality.
Combining a special longitudinal profile with fibre twisting, we present a novel concept for the amplification of structured light maintaining both complex polarization profile and spatial intensity distribution. Our recent results also show that structured light can also be coherently combined, enabling power scaling in analogy with a Gaussian beam.