Abstract

Thulium-doped fiber lasers operating with wavelengths in the vicinity of 2 µm are useful for several emerging applications including generating mid-IR light via nonlinear frequency conversion. In this study we describe the design and construction of a thulium fiber laser system comprising a master oscillator and a power amplifier. The first stage is a Q-switched, thulium-doped photonic crystal fiber oscillator utilizing an acousto-optic modulator to produce 65-80 nanosecond pulses. A diffraction grating in the cavity provides wavelength tunability from 1.8 – 2µm. The oscillator produced up to 3 W of average power and 150 µJ pulse energies, corresponding to 2.3 kW peak powers. The amplifier stage consists of a large mode area, thulium-doped, step-index fiber seeded with powers up to 2 W from the oscillator. An output energy of 700 µJ with 81 ns pulse width, was achieved at a wavelength of 1.9 µm. The effect of the fiber holder temperature on the amplifier performance relative to output pulse energy and seed wavelength was also studied. As a part of this thesis, a methodology has been developed to thoroughly characterize Tm:fiber amplifier performance. This has been the subject of prior work by several research groups, however, this work explicitly focuses on the precise characterization of absorbed pump power, pump bleaching, and extracted amplified energy for a range of input seeds power, pulse energy, and wavelength in order to better understand amplifier performance.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2016

Semester

Summer

Advisor

Richardson, Martin

Degree

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (M.S.E.E.)

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Department

Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering

Degree Program

Electrical Engineering

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0006240

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0006240

Language

English

Release Date

August 2021

Length of Campus-only Access

5 years

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

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