In recent years, the demand for high-power, polarization maintaining single mode lasers operating in the 1.55 µm wavelength band significantly increased due to technological advances in free space communication, coherent LiDAR, quantum computing, and remote sensing. These applications benefit from the compactness, robustness, and efficiency of diode-pumped Erbium Ytterbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EYDFAs) and triggered the development of EYDFs with enhanced performance. In this work, we demonstrate a new single-mode PM EYDF with robust single-mode operation beyond 20 W output power and discuss the remaining challenges to scale the power further and how we plan to mitigate those.
|