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3Gas fiber lasers: recent advances and prospects
A.V. Gladyshev
Prokhorov General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dianov Fiber Optics Research Center, 38 Vavilov st., Moscow, Russia, 119991
In recent years, gas fiber lasers (GFLs) have shown rapid progress. An active medium of such lasers is based on gas-filled hollow-core fibers (HCFs), thus providing wide opportunities in generating laser radiation at various wavelengths. Moreover, the GFLs open up the possibility of achieving high peak and/or average powers that exceed the damage threshold of any solid-core fibers.
Depending on the gas that fills the HCF, the GFLs can be divided into two types: 1) the Raman GFLs, which implement stimulated Raman scattering to transfer the pump power to longer wavelengths, and 2) the GFLs based on population inversion.
The Raman GFLs have demonstrated great potential for high-power operation with average output power now as high as 110 W [1]. Moreover, the Raman GFLs enabled a convenient way of generating ultrashort pulses in the mid-IR [2] and allowed mid-IR supercontinuum generation in HCFs [3].
The population inversion GFLs appeared to be convenient for continuous-wave operation. This type of GFLs have demonstrated the output powers as high as 8 W at the wavelength of 3.1 ^m [4].
The vast majority of the population inversion GFLs demonstrated so far required optical pumping by other laser sources (Fig. 1a). Strictly speaking, such GFL scheme presents not a generator, but only an optical converter of the pump radiation. The progress in generating of laser radiation inside a HCF has been achieved very recently by demonstrating the first GFLs pumped by a 2.45-GHz microwave gas discharge (Fig. 1b) [5,6].
These results open up new opportunities for laser generation at various wavelengths from ultraviolet to mid-infrared that are hardly accessible by other methods.
Fig. 1. The schemes of gas lasers based on hollow-core fibers (HCF): (a) Commonly used optical converter of the pump laser radiation. (b) Recently demonstrated optical generator.
This work was supported by Russian Science Foundation (RSF) (grant № 22-19-00542).
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