Coherent light generators – Optical fiber laser
Patent
1990-04-16
1991-09-17
Gonzalez, Frank
Coherent light generators
Optical fiber laser
372 66, 372 75, 385115, H01S 307
Patent
active
050501739
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to a laser oscillator system whose basic building block is a side excited looped, lasing ion doped fiber laser oscillator with a single mirror, index matched to the output ends of said fiber loop. The invention is scaleable to any practical power level simply by adding together the said looped fiber laser oscillators to form a phased-locked bundle of said oscillators all index matched to a single output mirror. The invention has applications in the medical, industrial and defence fields where a scaleable source of diffraction limited, laser beam energy is required, in particular where its high structural flexibility is an advantage.
SUMMARY OF PRIOR ART
Prior art fiber bundle laser oscillators possessed two mirrored ends which could move independently of each other and said ends had to be optically treated separately. Prior art fiber bundle laser oscillators were excited either via one of the said two ends of via laser media inserted into said fibers in the core where undoped fibers were used. The optical excitation of prior art fiber bundle laser oscillators was very restricted because the diode pumps had to be matched to the very small fiber cores at the ends of said bundle. In the case of laser sources being inserted into a bundle of undoped fiber, a complex assembly procedure had to be followed which significantly increased the cost of said laser oscillator systems.
The present invention overcomes the complex and expensive assembly and operational costs of prior art fiber bundle based laser oscillator systems by providing simple side excitation of a large number of laser ion doped, looped fibers simultaneously. In applications where only an unswitched laser beam is required, that is, in applications demanding only a continuous or pulsed laser output beam with no selective switching of the individual fibers, the present invention provides a major advance on prior art fiber bundle laser systems providing a cost effective means of generating a laser beam which is scaleable in power simply by adding more fiber loops to the bundle and providing additional diode excitation sources for the side excitation of said bundle via a simple, direct, side illumination of said fiber bundle.
The present invention is relatively simple to manufacture in comparison with prior art laser oscillator systems. A single mode, optical fiber doped with the appropriate lasing ion, is simply wound onto a rotating drum and automatically moved by the stacking action which provides a coherently packed reel of optical fibers. Once the thickness of the said optical fiber layers have built up on the drum, which has to be of a diameter which is far greater than the thickness of the fiber layers, the said layers of coherently packed, and the doped optical fibers are cut along the axis of rotation of said drum so that the required looped fiber laser bundle is automatically produced as the fiber layers are moved from said drum. By bringing the two free ends of said fiber bundle together into a common aperture and optically polishing said aperture and index matching it to a single laser output mirror, the invention can be completed in a relatively short time as far as the manufacture of one of its major components is concerned. The invention is scaleable to any practical power level because its size simply depends on the size of the drum used in the manufacture and the length of fiber wound onto said drum.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
These are two approaches that can be taken to the generation of a laser beam within laser oscillators either the laser oscillator's active medium is excited as a whole or the active medium can be split into a large number of sections, the laser beam output of each of the said sections being then phased-locked together to produce a single beam equivalent to that emitted by the single section medium laser oscillator.
Two development avenues have resulted in the techniques necessary to generate a single laser beam by phase-locking the output beam of a large number
REFERENCES:
patent: 3471215 (1969-10-01), Snitzer
patent: 4682335 (1987-07-01), Hughes
patent: 4835778 (1989-05-01), Kafka et al.
Gonzalez Frank
Morse Susan S.
Phased Array Lasers Pty Ltd.
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