Open AccessPulsed operation of a resonantly pumped, linearly polarised, large mode area holmium-doped fibre amplifier
Author(s) -
Alexander Hemming,
Jim Richards,
Nikita Simakov,
Alan Davidson,
Neil Carmody,
John Haub,
Adrian Carter
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.22.007186
Subject(s) - holmium , optics , materials science , amplifier , cladding (metalworking) , doping , fiber laser , pulse duration , laser beam quality , optical fiber , laser , optoelectronics , physics , laser beams , cmos , metallurgy
We present the design of a polarisation maintaining, resonantly and cladding pumped, large mode area holmium-doped fibre. We describe the operation of this fibre in a pulsed amplifier configuration. The amplifier produced pulses with energy of 2.25 mJ and duration of 20 ns at a repetition rate of 20 kHz and average power of 45 W. The holmium-doped fibre provided >10 dB of gain at 2.09 µm and the polarisation extinction ratio was >11.5 dB. The beam quality of the output (M2) was 1.6. To the best of our knowledge this is the highest pulse energy achieved from any singly holmium-doped fibre by an order of magnitude.