Laserati

31 July 2008, Southampton, UK, SPI Lasers, a leading designer and manufacturer of fiber lasers, today announced that its latest products will double in power and control capability, enabling customers to cut and weld materials with faster process times and with more advanced control options than ever before. SPI has increased its air-cooled lasers from 100 to 200W power and water cooled from 200 to 400W power, whilst also creating unique laser control functions offering direct application benefits across a wide range of laser machining applications.

"The power, versatility and control capabilities of SPI's R4 Platform Products make them the most advanced high power fiber lasers on the market today, enabling ground breaking process improvements." said Andy Appleyard, Product Line Manager for High Power Laser Systems.

January 2008 issue of Nature Photonics has a technology focus on fiber lasers. Some recent research highlights are presented, like report of millijoule femtosecond fiber laser from Jena University. Several people from companies (SPI Lasers, IPG Photonics, Koheras) are invited to write their perspective on fiber lasers. Prof. Andreas Tuennermann, head of the Fraunhofer Insititute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering in Jena, Germany, is interviewed on developments of fiber laser and his views on its future.

Among all the highlights, I think ultrashort pulse fiber laser is the center of spotlight. It seems suddenly, lot of companies emerge competing on femtosecond fiber lasers. Just point a few of them: IMRA, MenloSystem, Koheras, Toptica, Fianium, and FEMTO Lasers, etc.

Following is the Editorial of this Technology Focus:

High-power and highly efficient diode-cladding-pumped Ho^3+-doped silica fiber lasers - Stuart D. Jackson, Frank Bugge, Götz Erbert
We demonstrate high-power operation from a singly Ho^3+-doped silica fiber laser that is cladding pumped directly with diode lasers operating at 1150 nm. Internal slope efficiencies approaching the Stokes limit were produced, and the maximum output power was 2.2 W. This result was achieved using a ... [Opt. Lett. 32, 3349-3351 (2007)] [Optics Letters]

www.strategies-u.com - Fiber laser sales are on track to pass $240 million this year, a
growth of 39% over 2006, with robust growth continuing through 2011 at
a rate of 26%, which will more than double the 2007 sales value. The
industrial laser market in which fiber lasers play will grow at nearly
10% per year over the same period. This is one of the conclusions of a
new report from Strategies Unlimited, the leading market research firm
covering optoelectronics markets. It should be good news to the nearly
40 suppliers of fiber lasers, as well as to the many suppliers of gain
blocks and laser components.

While much of the gain of fiber lasers come at the expense of
suppliers of solid-state lasers, suppliers of the other laser types
will see steady growth as well, amounting to about 7% per year through
the period. The strongest gains for fiber lasers will be in high-power
metals processing and in micro materials processing, a diverse set of
mid-power and pulsed applications.

This year several prominent laser suppliers announced fiber laser
products, including GSI, Newport, Rofin-Sinar, and Trumpf. These
announcements add credibility to the new technology, which is currently
dominated in the market by IPG Photonics. Discussions have now moved
from open skepticism to more nuanced specifics. Many key questions
remain, however. In particular, how fast and how much market share can
kilowatt fiber lasers gain from carbon dioxide lasers in sheet metal
cutting? And, how much vertical integration is necessary to succeed in
the fiber laser market?

High-pulse-energy actively Q-switched Tm^3+-doped silica 2 μm fiber laser pumped at 792 nm - Marc Eichhorn, Stuart D. Jackson
A diode-pumped Q-switched Tm^3+-doped double-clad silica fiber laser is reported providing average powers of up to 30 W at pulse widths of only 41 ns and repetition rates in the range of 10-125 kHz. Up to 270 μJ pulse energy was produced. Amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) buildup limits ... [Opt. Lett. 32, 2780-2782 (2007)] [Optics Letters]

Everyone likes fiber laser. Now US Navy is also looking at fiber laser.

In a presentation and white paper given last week at a meeting of the American Society of Naval Engineers, Captain David Kiel said that lasers using as little as 10 and 20 kilowatts were used to blast mortars and zap small watercraft.  Neither the Navy -- nor its corporate partner, Raytheon -- is saying exactly how they pulled it off.  But the key, according to Kiel, is fiber lasers...

Via Danger Room.

IRVINE, Calif., Jan. 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Newport Corporation (Nasdaq: NEWP) today announced that it has formed a new Fiber Laser Business Group within its Spectra-Physics Lasers Division to lead the company's efforts in fiber laser and amplifier technology development. The group's charter is to develop and commercialize products incorporating the company's leading-edge capabilities in diode lasers, fiber coupling, frequency conversion, optics and photonics packaging.

Long fiber lasers find another interesting application: A New Paradigm for Secure Key Distribution.

Giant Fiber Lasers: A New Paradigm for Secure Key Distribution

Jacob Scheuer and Amnon Yariv

We propose and analyze a new concept for secure key distribution based on establishing laser oscillations between the sender and receiver. Compared to quantum mechanics based systems, our scheme allows for significantly higher key-establishing rates and longer ranges. By properly designing the laser structure, it is possible to increase the difficulty of eavesdropping almost arbitrarily, thus making our scheme an intriguing alternative and a complementary technology to quantum key-distribution systems.

A recent paper proposes a new solution for achieving robust single-mode guidance in fibers with very large mode area. The basic idea is to convert the fundamental mode to a higher-order mode with a large mode area and then convert the light back to the fundamental mode at the end. The mode conversion can be done with a long-period fiber Bragg grating. The article discusses this idea and its limitations. [The Photonics Spotlight]

I am in Pisa, Italy right now for Europhoton 2006 conference. In the past two days, there are six summer school lectures. Among them the lecture on "high power fiber lasers" by Almantas Galvanauskas from Michigan University is of most interesting to me.

I learned something new from the lecture. For example, there are so called effective single mode fibers, which basically are multimode fibers but the high order modes are selectively coupled out of the core. It is an attractive way to design large mode area fibers that are desirable for scaling the fiber laser power and also for fiber delivery of narrow band lasers. Another interesting information from the lecture is that some people had demonstrated SBS suppression in a fiber with an acoustic waveguide outside the fiber optical core. This adds a new method on fighting SBS. I will check the technical details when back to work.