Study of seeding mechanisms of TMI with spatially and temporally resolved imaging

In this work we investigate transverse mode instability (TMI) in the presence of pump intensity noise and a controlled perturbation of the input coupling for a rod-type fiber amplifier using spatially and temporally resolved imaging (ST). We show that inherent pump intensity noise from the power supply can define significant peaks in the resulting TMI spectrum. ST measurements in the transition region of TMI also indicates that the simple picture of TMI being seeded by the combination of a static initial fraction of LP11 and pump or signal intensity noise is not valid for our measurements. Furthermore, we present seeding of TMI by perturbing the input coupling dynamically which allows measurements of the TMI gain as a function of frequency and signal power.