Enhancement of Stimulated Brillouin Scattering thresholds of high power narrow-linewidth fiber lasers through a simple line-broadening scheme using a combination of sinusoidal and white noise phase modulation

摘要

Narrow linewidth fiber lasers find widespread applications in beam combining, frequency conversion and remote detection. Power scaling of these lasers is mainly limited by Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). Currently, SBS is mitigated through linewidth broadening and/or fibers with enhanced mode area. The latter suffers from problems of beam degradation and modal instability making line broadening the primary technique for SBS suppression. Line broadening can be achieved with phase modulation of lasers using white noise, pseudo-random bit streams or arbitrary waveform generators. The simplest implementation is with white noise source with the latter two requiring greater resources. We recently demonstrated a 10GHz linewidth 0.5kW polarization maintaining fiber laser, where it was observed that the SBS threshold did not directly scale with linewidth. This effect was identified as arising from the slow roll-off of the spectrum in white-noise modulated spectra which seeds the SBS process. The seeding is due to the reflections from the fiber end facet at these broadened linewidths where the spectrum has appreciable power at the Stokes wavelength. This is anticipated to be fundamental limiter for power scaling of narrow linewidth fiber lasers. In this work we overcome these drawbacks through a simple phase modulation scheme that incorporates noise waveforms together with sinusoidal modulation. This enables the spectrum to have sharp roll-off with flatter central region resulting in substantial reduction in seeding of SBS from end facet. With this simple architecture, we demonstrate scaling of SBS limited power by more than 1.5 times over pure noise modulation.