Fibre Lasers

A fibre laser is a device that is constructed within an optical fibre and uses the fibre itself as the resonating cavity where the laser action takes place. A laser diode is used as a pump, and mirrors receive the pump wavelength on one side and transmit the lased wavelength on the other. The fibre is doped with rare earth ions such as erbium, neodymium, ytterbium, thulium or praseodymium, and single or multiple laser diodes can be used for pumping. The fibre laser structure features a high surface to volume ratio, which reduces heating effects, and the guiding effect of the fibre avoids thermo-optical problems even when significant heating occurs. As a result, devices can be manufactured with output powers of several hundreds of watts or even kilowatts from a single fibre. Many variants of fibre lasers are available, including up-conversion fibre lasers, narrow-linewidth fibre lasers, Q-switched fibre lasers, mode-locked fibre lasers, Raman fibre lasers and devices that integrate semiconductor optical amplifiers. Pacer offers a range of pulsed fibre lasers and laser systems from Pyrophotonics and B&WTek