Cladding-pumped laser and amplifier for E- and S-bands based on multimode bismuth-doped graded-index fibers: toward “watt-level” output power

In this Letter, we investigated the potential scalability of output power of a cladding-pumped laser and a power amplifier (booster) based on a multimode Bi-doped fiber (BDF) using the mode-selection approach. We fabricated the multimode double-clad graded-index (GRIN) fiber with a confined Bi-doped germanosilicate glass core with a diameter of ≈30 and ≈60 µm. Using femtosecond (fs) inscription technology with high spatial resolution, Bragg gratings of a special transverse structure allowing the selection of low-order modes were written into the core of BDFs. The operation features of the cladding-pumped multimode bismuth-doped GRIN fiber lasers with the inscribed Bragg gratings with various reflection coefficients were investigated. In addition, the behavior of the output power and the beam quality (M 2 parameter) of the optical radiation of the developed devices was studied. The CW laser and booster operating at nearly 1.45 µm with maximum output powers of ≈0.8 and ≈1 W, respectively, based on the 60-µm-core BDF under pumping by multimode laser diodes at 808 nm were developed, which are, to the best of our knowledge, the most powerful cladding-pumped BDF devices to date. Near single-mode lasing (M 2 <1.3) is demonstrated for a 30-µm-core fiber. The experimental data open new possibilities to achieve higher powers in cladding-pumped BDF sources, which are more cost-effective compared to core-pumped counterparts.