Current Status and Prospects of High-Power Fiber Laser Technology (Invited Paper)

Over the past two decades, fiber-based lasers have made remarkable progress, now having reached power levels exceeding kilowatts and drawing a huge amount of attention from academy and industry as a replacement technology for bulk lasers. In this paper we review the significant factors that have led to the progress of fiber lasers, such as gain-fiber regimes based on ytterbium-doped silica, optical pumping schemes through the combination of laser diodes and double-clad fiber geometries, and tandem schemes for minimizing quantum defects. Furthermore, we discuss various power-limitation issues that are expected to incur with respect to the ultimate power scaling of fiber lasers, such as efficiency degradation, thermal hazard, and system-instability growth in fiber lasers, and various relevant methods to alleviate the aforementioned issues. This discussion includes fiber nonlinear effects, fiber damage, and modal-instability issues, which become more significant as the power level is scaled up. In addition, we also review beam-combining techniques, which are currently receiving a lot of attention as an alternative solution to the power-scaling limitation of high-power fiber lasers. In particular, we focus more on the discussion of the schematics of a spectral beam-combining system and their individual requirements. Finally, we discuss prospects for the future development of fiber laser technologies, for them to leap forward from where they are now, and to continue to advance in terms of their power scalability.