Highly Reliable PM High Power Pump Combiner

Based on our commercial high power fiber laser component manufacturing know-how, in this program, we propose to develop several critical improvements in high power combiner fabrication, including glass capillary encapsulation and mode adaptive matching techniques that holds the promise of substantially reduce the system mismatching scattering loss, leading to a new class of high power combiner of unprecedented power handling capability and robustness. Our approaches overcome all the major hurdles in high power pump combiner with high brightness and high efficiency improvement. Agiltron proposes to realize a reliably manufacturing process for high power fiber laser combiner reaching 5KW of CW laser power pumping level. In Phase I, we will demonstrate the low loss and high beam quality pump combiner In Phase II we will produce prototype with having high power scalability and high reliability as well as adaptability with various laser fibers, including PM LMA-DC fibers and photonic crystal fiber (PCF) to cover a wide operation wavelength range from 1 to 2 microns. BENEFIT: High power pump combiners are critical components in a new class of fiber lasers for Air Force laser weapons. High power fiber lasers are also applicable in many other military and commercial systems including laser radar, free space communication systems, laser materials processing, laser marking, laser welding, solar panel fabrication, and laser surgery.