Recent advances in high-power and high-energy multicore fiber lasers

Since the observation in June 2000 of a high-brightness beam emitted from a 7-core Yb-doped phase-locked fiber laser array, much progress has been made to advance this laser technology by (1) increasing the number of the Yb-doped cores from 7 to 19, (2) establishing a power-scaling model for fabricating a multicore fiber laser containing 127 cores, that can potentially yield an output power greater than 10 KW, (3) developing a demountable side-pumping coupler to allow injection of the diode laser pump directly into the fiber along its length, (4) improving the beam quality with appropriate choice of the fiber parameters, and (5) enhancing the Q-switched laser energy utilizing multicore fiber laser arrays. This paper will present details on these developments.