Abstract

A promising way for power scaling of fiber-based laser sources while maintaining a compact configuration is coherent combining of multicore fiber amplifiers, especially when the power in each core is limited by nonlinear effects. An example application is Doppler LIDAR, where long (~ 100 ns) energetic (~100 µJ - 1 mJ) narrow-linewidth pulses are used to probe wind speed in the atmosphere. In this regime, Brillouin scattering (SBS) ultimately limits the peak power to a value that mostly depends on core diameter and fiber length. Multicore fibers can achieve the same SBS limit in each core, thus increasing the output power after combination compared to a single core fiber. If the pump is shared by all cores, this solution can also be more compact than coherent combining of several fibers.

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