May 2013
Spotlight Summary by Siddharth Ramachandran
Amplification of cylindrically polarized laser beams in single crystal fiber amplifiers
In the last decade, perhaps the most extensively studied complex beam-shape of light is the class of vortex beams, which possess phase or polarization singularities. These beams are interesting because they resemble the emission patterns of single molecule dipoles, and they can carry orbital angular momentum in addition to spin (polarisation). They have several potential applications, such as laser-based electron and particle acceleration, higher-dimensional quantum encryption, information capacity scaling, single-molecule spectroscopy, nano-scale imaging and metal machining. In this last application space, of metal machining, the cylindrically symmetric polarisation distribution of the light beam has been known to offer beneficial performance, such as more uniform and clean cuts, higher aspect ratios, as well as better cutting speeds – all of which are performance metrics that are critical to the laser machining industry. The economic as well as technological importance of laser machining cannot be understated, for it enables automating entire industrial assembly lines.
That radially polarised lasers can offer benefits, has been well known since the 1980s. However, such beams were also known to be inherently more unstable compared to conventional Gaussian beams. Much work has gone into addressing these instability problems, albeit mostly for low power applications such as quantum encryption, information capacity scaling, spectroscopy and nano-imaging. The high powers needed for metal machining pose a few additional challenges – the need for ultrashort pulses (for high peak powers), and the management of thermal instabilities.
This work is an impressive demonstration of the solution of all these interrelated problems. The authors use single-crystal fibers which provide both a cylindrically symmetric guiding medium – of necessity for generating cylindrical polarisation beams – as well as excellent heat sinking properties. The high powers themselves are obtained by using a MOPA configuration often used for power scaling lasers, and it is very encouraging that the performance they get out of a system seeded with a radially polarised beam is similar to that of a system seeded with a conventional Gaussian beam – in both cases they obtain approximately 100 W of output. Crucially, the degree of polarisation of the input doughnut beam (~95%) does not degrade after amplification – a key metric that suggests excellent thermal stability of their laser. Depolarisation of cylindrically symmetric beams due to propagation has, in fact, been one of the most difficult challenges to overcome, and the results in this paper provide proof of the fact that, even if there may be thermal instabilities in the single-crystal fiber, the design is such that (thermal) perturbations to the system are substantially cylindrically symmetric – an impressive engineering advance.
This paper paves the way for the realistic consideration and deployment of high-power radially polarised lasers in the rapidly growing application space laser-based industrial machining. Above and beyond that, the success of the authors in creating high-power ultrashort radially polarised beams may have other far reaching implications, perhaps in the fields of electron and particle acceleration.
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That radially polarised lasers can offer benefits, has been well known since the 1980s. However, such beams were also known to be inherently more unstable compared to conventional Gaussian beams. Much work has gone into addressing these instability problems, albeit mostly for low power applications such as quantum encryption, information capacity scaling, spectroscopy and nano-imaging. The high powers needed for metal machining pose a few additional challenges – the need for ultrashort pulses (for high peak powers), and the management of thermal instabilities.
This work is an impressive demonstration of the solution of all these interrelated problems. The authors use single-crystal fibers which provide both a cylindrically symmetric guiding medium – of necessity for generating cylindrical polarisation beams – as well as excellent heat sinking properties. The high powers themselves are obtained by using a MOPA configuration often used for power scaling lasers, and it is very encouraging that the performance they get out of a system seeded with a radially polarised beam is similar to that of a system seeded with a conventional Gaussian beam – in both cases they obtain approximately 100 W of output. Crucially, the degree of polarisation of the input doughnut beam (~95%) does not degrade after amplification – a key metric that suggests excellent thermal stability of their laser. Depolarisation of cylindrically symmetric beams due to propagation has, in fact, been one of the most difficult challenges to overcome, and the results in this paper provide proof of the fact that, even if there may be thermal instabilities in the single-crystal fiber, the design is such that (thermal) perturbations to the system are substantially cylindrically symmetric – an impressive engineering advance.
This paper paves the way for the realistic consideration and deployment of high-power radially polarised lasers in the rapidly growing application space laser-based industrial machining. Above and beyond that, the success of the authors in creating high-power ultrashort radially polarised beams may have other far reaching implications, perhaps in the fields of electron and particle acceleration.
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Article Information
Amplification of cylindrically polarized laser beams in single crystal fiber amplifiers
Stefan Piehler, Xavier Délen, Martin Rumpel, Julien Didierjean, Nicolas Aubry, Thomas Graf, Francois Balembois, Patrick Georges, and Marwan Abdou Ahmed
Opt. Express 21(9) 11376-11381 (2013) View: HTML | PDF