ABSTRACT
Fiber lasers have become ubiquitous with the emergence of the telecommunications industry. Fiber lasers have been demonstrated spanning wavelengths from just below 400 nm to nearly 3 μm. Among fiber lasers, the most widely used rare earthdoped silica fibers are doped with Er+3, Nd+3, Yb+3, and Tm+3. These systems have the advantage of having pump bands that are compatible with highly efficient diode lasers as well as having quantum efficiencies that range from 0.63 to 0.95 depending on the rare earth ion being excited and the pump and emission wavelengths. Allfiber-based systems provide a tunable performance with minimal sensitivity to environmental disturbances as well as high reliability because the all-fiber laser cavity cannot be misaligned and diffraction-limited beams are generally ensured by the use of single-mode optical fibers. As a result of these advantages, fiber lasers are being employed in a steadily increasing number of applications that previously employed conventional solid-state lasers. Finally, the availability of very efficient and very high-power fiber amplifiers offers a simple means of scaling the output power of tunable fiber laser systems.
