Ultimate capacity analysis of cladding-pumped10/130 Tm:fiber laser

The ultimate capacity of a cladding-pumped 10/130 Tm:fiber is experimentally investigated with a 793 nm laser diode bidirectionally pumped amplifier. The laser system works stably at the output powers of 52 W,65 W, and 87 W. Eventually, the damage of the amplifier occurs when the output power reaches about 103.5 W with a total incident pump power of 176.8 W. Considering the incident seed power of 12.3 W,the amplifier conversion efficiency is estimated to be about 51.6% before it is damaged. With valuable exploration, we achieve the first air-cooling 60 W Tm:fiber laser at 1945.845 nm with a spectral linewidth of 0.4 nm.The laser power stability reaches 1.24% during a continuous test time of 65 h. The beam quality is measured as M_x~2=1.16 and M_y~2=1.14.