Article Abstracts | February 2007
The complete article appears in the February 2007 issue of Photonics Spectra. If you do not have a copy of this issue,
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Designing Fiber for Better Lasers
Custom-designed fibers suppress nonlinearities and boost output power.
by Donnell Walton, Corning Inc.
Fiber lasers are becoming increasingly popular alternatives for applications that require high power — hundreds of watts to kilowatts — such as materials processing, surgery and biochemistry. Their high efficiency, enviable beam quality, small footprint and low maintenance requirements make them ideal replacements for many other types of lasers that have dominated the marketplace in recent decades.
Although it seems counterintuitive that a tiny glass fiber, roughly the diameter of a human hair, could rival the output power of huge industrial lasers, the fiber’s small size is actually the secret of its success. The small diameter and long length — typically meters or tens of meters — provide an enormous surface-to-volume ratio, which in turn alleviates the greatest single obstacle to designing high-power lasers: removal of surplus heat...
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