Open AccessInvestigation of ion-ion interaction effects on Yb3+-doped fiber amplifiers
Author(s) -
Jingwei Wu,
Xiushan Zhu,
Chun Xia,
Hua Wei,
Kort Wiersma,
Michael Li,
Jie Zong,
Arturo ChavezPirson,
Robert A. Norwood,
N. Peyghambarian
Publication year - 2019
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.27.028179
Subject(s) - materials science , ion , ytterbium , fiber laser , doping , amplifier , laser , optics , fiber , atomic physics , wavelength , optoelectronics , chemistry , physics , organic chemistry , cmos , composite material
Ytterbium (Yb 3+ )-doped materials have been widely used for high efficiency high energy laser sources at the 1 µm wavelength region because of their very low quantum defect and the unique simple energy level structure of Yb 3+ , resulting in no excited-state absorption and low occurrence probability of deleterious ion-ion interaction processes. It has been generally recognized that these ion-ion interaction processes have very little influence on the operation of Yb 3+ -doped fiber lasers at low and moderate power levels. However, our recent study shows that the performance of Yb 3+ -doped fiber amplifiers operating at low power levels is still influenced by the ion-ion interaction processes due to the large amount of population at the upper laser level 2 F 5/2 . In this paper, experimental evidences of the ion-ion interaction effects in Yb 3+ -doped fiber amplifiers are presented and a new model including these effects is developed for the numerical simulation. Our experimental and numerical investigations on the 976 nm and 1030 nm Yb 3+ -doped silica and phosphate fiber amplifiers show that ion-ion interaction has non-negligible impact on the performance of Yb 3+ -doped fiber amplifiers indeed, and compared to Yb 3+ -doped silica fibers, Yb 3+ -doped phosphate fibers suffer much less from the ion-ion interaction effects due to the much less clustered ions.