Abstract

High-energy single-frequency nanosecond Er-doped fiber (EDF) lasers are widely used in LIDAR and remote sensing applications. The maximum peak-power of such systems is strongly limited by stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) [1]. SBS suppression requires usage of short large-mode-area (LMA) EDFs. At the same time, increase of Er ions concentration (required to increase pump absorption and decrease fiber length) leads to strong concentration quenching and therefore significant decrease of pump-conversion efficiency. As a result, to date such systems with hundreds of Watts of peak power at 1.55 µm have quite low (<5 %) wall-plug efficiency [1, 2]. In this work we present simple design of kW-level single-mode single-frequency nanosecond amplifier with record slope electrical-to-optical efficiency of 8 %.

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