NICOP - Power-scalable blue fiber lasers
Abstract
Underwater and Submarine optical sensing technologies, (e.g. LIDAR) depend on the abilityto propagate light through water. Since ocean water loss minimizes in the blue spectral range, itwould be critical to develop sources that are powerful enough to overcome the scattering andturbulent nature of the un-guided medium in this wavelength range. Such sources would need theability of being efficiently modulated while also being compact and lightweight to facilitatedeployment on aircrafts.Here, we propose a wavelength translator that is fiber based, can handle high energies, and ishighly efficient compared to existing technologies. Following our demonstrations over the lastfew years, it is now well known that higher order mode (HOM) fibers offer significant modearea, and hence power, scaling, as well as dispersion control. The scheme proposed here exploitsthese properties to enable generation of light directly out of fiber in the spectral range of 880-980nm, which when doubled with an appropriate nonlinear crystal, yields a high energy source at440-490 nm, covering a range of wavelengths of interest in underwater sensing andcommunications applications. Our design methodology utilizes conventional fiber lasers emittingin the 10xx nm range, followed by our specialty HOM fiber that yields the desired near-infra-redemission, which precedes the final frequency doubling step that is capable of simultaneouslyconverting the structured HOM output into a Gaussian at half the wavelength.Given the inherent power scalability and efficiency of our platform, we expect to develop theproof of concept of a laser capable of emitting 10 kW peak power pulses (which, when obtainedwith 100 ns long pulses, yields millijoule pulse energies) in the blue spectral range with opticalefficiencies as high as 40%. This represents an order of magnitude improvement in efficiencyover bulky optical parametric oscillators (currently the only viable options for accessing the bluespectral range with high energy lasers) while providing for a lightweight compact source that isfield-deployable.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 26, 2018
- Source ID
- N629091812101
Entities
People
- Valdas Pasiskevicius
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- Royal Institute of Technology
- United States Navy