High performance pulsed coherent fiber laser emitting >1.7kW at 1060nm in ns regime

Fiber lasers and amplifiers are used in a variety of applications either for scientific (spectroscopy, medicine ...) or industrial applications (free space communications, laser marking and drilling ...). The combination of doped double clad fibers (DCF) and high power multimode semiconductors laser diodes technologies allows to achieve very high output power in very compact, robust and maintenance free systems. Yb³⁺ doped DCF are well suited for 1μm wavelength amplification. In pulsed regime, achievable peak power can be strongly limited by nonlinear effects such as Kerr effect, Stimulated Roman Scattering (SRS) or Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS). Consequently, the optimisation of optical amplifier architecture is required. In this paper, we demonstrate performances obtained for the generation of 2ns optical pulses up to >1.7kW peak power in a Master Oscillator Power Fiber Amplifier (MOPFA) configuration. The laser seed signal at 1060nm is emitted out of a single longitudinal mode source with spectral linewidth <0.2nm. The pulse repetition rate can be changed between 3 and 30MHz. The high power stage, based on a 2-stages architecture, allows to deliver >10W average output power with a good beam quality (M²<1.2). No significant limitation due to nonlinear effects of the type of the Kerr effect or SRS appears by means of the optimisation of the final stage's fiber parameters. Results, such as a concentration of more than 80% of the total output power in a 1nm window around the central wavelength and above all an excellent conservation of the spectral properties of the seed source are demonstrated for a peak power of >1.7kW. These high performances are obtained in a fully-integrated device.