2013 R&D 100 Award: New tech could mean more power for fiber lasers

An LLNL team of six physicists has developed a new technology that is a stepping stone to enable some of the limitations on high-power fiber lasers to be overcome. Their technology, dubbed "Efficient Mode-Converters for High-Power Fiber Amplifiers," allows the power of fiber lasers to be increased while maintaining high beam quality. Currently, fiber lasers are used in machining, on factory floors and in a number of defense applications and can produce tens of kilowatts of power.The conventional fiber laser design features a circular core and has fundamental limitations that make it impractical to allow higher laser power unless the core area is increased. LLNL researchers have pioneered a design to increase the laser's core area along the axis of the ribbon fiber. Their design makes it difficult to use a conventional laser beam, so the LLNL team converted the beam into a profile that propagates into the ribbon fiber and is converted back once it is amplified. The use of this LLNL technology will permit the construction of higher power lasers for lower costs and increase the power of fiber lasers from tens of kilowatts of power to about 100 kilowatts and potentially even higher.

The winners are:
LLNL: Arun Sridharan, Paul Pax, Derrek Drachenberg, James Armstrong, John Heebner, Jay Dawson

See other 2013 R&D 100 winners:
https://ipo.llnl.gov/?q=about_ipo-rd100-rd100awards

Видео 2013 R&D 100 Award: New tech could mean more power for fiber lasers канала Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory