Abstract

This work was undertaken a project to investigate whether active-fiber bundles are useful as high-power laser materials because of their expected low thermal effects. High-power solid-state lasers usually have a poor beam quality of more than 10 times diffraction limited because of thermal effects, such as thermal lensing and thermally induced birefringence. The expected disadvantages of active fibers and fiber bundles are strong phase distortions. We prove here that it is generally possible to eliminate these distortions by stimulated brillouin scattering (SBS), so that good beam quality is regained.

© 1995 Optical Society of America