Burn-in testing in high-power fully-aperiodic large-pitch-fiber amplifiers (Conference Presentation)

Recently, significant work has been conducted to reach high energy or peak power in fiber lasers. Microstructured fibers with large mode areas were developed to address this concern [1,2] and have allowed to access to the best state-of-the-art performances in terms of pulse energy, average power and peak power [3,4]. Although these fibers were designed for power scaling while keeping a single transverse mode propagation, the onset of transverse modal instabilities (TMI) degrades significantly the beam quality owing to the re-confinement of one or more higher order modes (HOMs) in the gain area. That effect suddenly appears when a certain average power threshold is exceeded. To push further the TMI power threshold, an original aperiodic pattern made of solid low-index inclusions embedded into the optical cladding was proposed to enhance the HOMs delocalization out of the gain region and thus ensure an effective single-mode emission. Such fibers are called Fully-Aperiodic Large-Pitch Fibers (FA-LPF). In this work, we realize for the first time a burn-in experiment with a 84 µm core Yb-doped FA-LPF in amplification regime. Using a 400 W pump diode at 976 nm and two different seeders, the power scaling as well as the spatial beam quality and its temporal behavior [5] were investigated in amplifier configuration in two different temporal regimes (nanosecond and picosecond pulses). After 800 hours, the maximum extracted average signal power decreases from 139W to 128W in picosecond regime and no TMI have been observed. Explanations on the power decrease will be given during the conference.