All-fiber eye-safe pulsed laser with Er-Yb Co-doped multi-stage amplifier

We report an all-fiber pulsed laser with multistage fiber amplifier which was suitable for high power eye-safe free space optical communications. Tapered structure has been utilized between booster and final amplifiers, which could increase the power coupling from the former fiber into the core of the latter fiber, and the beam quality of the output laser could be improved simultaneously. A maximum output power over 6 W has been achieved from the master-oscillator-power-amplifier system. With the multi-stage configuration and forward pumping, the optical signal to noise ratio was measured to be better than 50 dB.