High peak- and average-power pulse shaped fiber laser in the ns-regime applying step-index XLMA gain fibers

Pulsed fiber lasers and continuous-wave (cw) fiber lasers have become the tool of choice in more and more laser based industrial applications like metal cutting and welding mainly because of their robustness, compactness, high brightness, high efficiency and reasonable costs. However, to further increase the productivity with those laser types there is a great demand for even higher laser power specifications. In this context we demonstrate a pulsed high peak- and averagepower fiber laser in a Master Oscillator Power Amplifier (MOPA) configuration with selectable pulse durations between 1 ns and several hundred nanoseconds. To overcome fiber nonlinearities such as stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) and self-phase-modulation (SPM) flexible Ytterbium doped extra-large mode area (XLMA) step index fibers, prepared by novel powder-sinter technology, have been used as gain fibers. As an example, for 12 ns pulses with a repetition rate of 10 kHz, a pump power limited average laser output power of more than 400 W in combination with peak powers of more than 3.5 MW (close to self-focusing-threshold) has been achieved in stable operation. The potentials of this laser system have been further explored towards longer pulse durations in order to achieve even higher pulse energies by means of pulse shaping techniques. In addition, investigations have been conducted with reduced pulse energies and repetition rates up to 500 kHz and average powers of more than 500 W at nearly diffraction limited beam quality.