High-brightness multimode fiber laser amplifier

Fiber lasers are widely used in various fields owing to their high efficiency, flexible transmission and excellent beam quality. In applications such as industrial manufacturing and defense systems, a higher output power is always desired. Nevertheless, the power scaling in fiber lasers is limited by nonlinear effects and transverse mode instability in conventional high-power fiber laser systems, where the laser is amplified within the fundamental fiber mode. A promising strategy to overcome these limitations is to utilize multimode fibers, which exhibit higher thresholds for both nonlinear effects and transverse mode instability, combined with wavefront shaping techniques to convert the output speckle pattern into a single concentrated spot. In this study, a high-power multimode fiber laser amplifier based on wavefront shaping is constructed and investigated, achieving a focused beam profile with a 168 W output power. The effects of objective function and the linewidth of seed laser on the system performance are also studied. Additionally, an all-fiber version of high-brightness multimode fiber laser amplifier is proposed. This work opens up new avenues for leveraging multimode fibers to achieve higher brightness in fiber lasers and may inspire other research based on wavefront shaping.