Xinyi Ding's research while affiliated with National University of Defense Technology and other places

Traditional ytterbium-doped high-power fiber lasers generally use a unidirectional output structure. To reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of the fiber laser, we propose a bidirectional output fiber laser (BOFL). The BOFL has many advantages over that of the traditional unidirectional output fiber laser (UOFL) and has a wide application in the industrial field. In theory, the model of the BOFL is established, and a comparison of the nonlinear effect in the traditional UOFL and the BOFL is studied. Experimentally, high-power continuous wave (CW) and quasi-continuous wave (QCW) BOFLs are demonstrated. In the continuous laser, we first combine the BOFL with the oscillating amplifying integrated structure, and a near-single-mode bidirectional 2 × 4 kW output with a total power of above 8 kW is demonstrated. Then, with the simple BOFL, a CW bidirectional 2 × 5 kW output with a total power of above 10 kW is demonstrated. By means of pump source modulation, a QCW BOFL is developed, and the output of a near-single mode QCW laser with a peak output of 2 × 4.5 kW with a total peak power of more than 9 kW is realized. Both CW and QCW output BOFL are the highest powers reported at present.

Quasi-continuous wave (QCW) laser has a very broad application in the industrial field, especially in additive manufacturing, surface treatment, laser cutting, laser cleaning, and laser drilling. Compared with the unidirectional fiber laser, the bidirectional output can be achieved two ports high power output with only one resonator, which can greatly reduce the industrial cost. However, there are few researches on QCW fiber lasers with bidirectional output. Here, we optimized and demonstrated a bidirectional output QCW laser with output power of 2 × 4.5 kW based on a double-clad ytterbium-doped fiber with a core/cladding diameter of 25/400 μm. The peak power at both ends reached 4515 W and 4694 W, respectively. The Raman suppression ratio at both ends of A and B is about 12 dB, and the beam quality factor M ² is about 1.37 and 1.42, respectively. The corresponding optical-to-optical efficiency is 79%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest peak power of QCW laser with near-single-mode beam quality in a bidirectional structure laser.

Bidirectional output fiber laser oscillators can realize two high-power laser outputs employing only a single-laser resonant cavity and hold the advantages of being low cost and of compact size. However, like other fiber lasers, their power improvement is limited by transverse mode instability (TMI). To achieve higher power output, in this paper, the characteristics and corresponding suppression method of the TMI in bidirectional output fiber laser oscillators were investigated for the first time. Firstly, the TMI threshold was obtained when the fiber laser oscillator was pumped by 976 nm LDs and 981 nm LDs, separately, and the difference between the two pumping conditions was researched in detail. After that, a comparison study between the bidirectional and unidirectional output fiber laser oscillators pumped by 981 nm LDs was carried out. In the experiment, the effect of pump distribution on the TMI threshold was also considered. The results show that the TMI threshold of the bidirectional-output laser pumped by 981 nm LDs is much higher than that pump by 976 nm LDs, which means that the effective TMI suppression methods in the unidirectional output laser are also applicable in the bidirectional output laser. In addition, it is found that the TMI threshold of a bidirectional output fiber laser is much lower than that of a unidirectional output fiber laser.