Page 445 - High Power Laser Handbook

CHAPTER 15

Introduction to

Optical Fiber Lasers

Liang Dong
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Center
for Optical Materials Science and Engineering Technologies
(COMSET), Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina

Martin E. Fermann
IMRA America, Ann Arbor, Michigan

15.1 Background

15.1.1 History
The benefit of using a rare-earth-doped single-mode optical fiber in a
laser cavity to provide a robust single spatial mode at the laser output
was realized as early as 1961 by E. Snitzer, who was then at America
Optical Company. High gain in neodymium-doped multimode silica
1
optical fiber lasers pumped by flash lamps was demonstrated a few
years later by Snitzer and C. Koester. A diode-pumped neodymium
2
multimode optical fiber laser was then demonstrated in the early
1970s by J. Stone and C. A. Burrus at Bell Laboratories. Work on
3
single-mode optical fiber lasers started in the mid-1980s, after the
development of rare-earth-doping methods that used modern optical
4–7
fiber fabrication processes based on vapor-phase deposition. Soon
thereafter, interest in fiber lasers and amplifiers took off, thanks to a
convergence of two key technologies in the late 1980s. The first tech-
nology was the availability of erbium-doped single-mode fibers,
which provided a unique gain medium for the very important tele-
communication window at 1.55 µm; erbium-doped fiber amplifiers

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