1, fiber laser is easy to realize continuous operation under low pump.
2. The fiber laser has a cylindrical structure, which is easy to be coupled with the optical fiber to realize various applications.
3. The radiation wavelength of the fiber laser is determined by the rare earth dopant of the matrix material, and is not controlled by the wavelength of the pump light. Therefore, the short wavelength laser diode corresponding to the absorption spectrum of rare earth ions can be used as a pump source to obtain laser output in the middle infrared band.
4. Fiber laser is compatible with current optical fiber devices, such as modulators, couplers and polarizers, so it can be made into an all-fiber system.
5. The fiber laser is simple in structure, compact in size, simple and reliable in operation and maintenance, and does not need complicated equipment such as water cooling structure in the solid-state laser system pumped by semiconductor laser.
6. Compared with lamp-pumped laser, the power consumption of fiber laser is only about 65438 0% of that of lamp-pumped laser system, and its efficiency is more than twice that of solid-state Nd:YAG laser pumped by semiconductor laser.
7. Because optical fiber can only transmit basic spatial modes, the beam quality of fiber laser is not affected by the operation of laser power, especially the high-power double-clad fiber laser has the advantages of high output power, large heat dissipation area and good beam quality, and the beam quality of output laser is close to the diffraction limit.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of fiber lasers?
1, Advantages of Fiber Laser
As a representative of the third generation laser technology, fiber laser has the following advantages:
(1) The advantages of miniaturization and intensification brought by the low manufacturing cost, mature technology and winding property of glass fiber.
(2) Glass fiber does not need strict phase matching for incident pump light like crystal, which is due to the wide absorption band caused by the uneven broadening of Stark splitting of glass matrix.
(3) The glass material has extremely low volume-area ratio, rapid heat dissipation and low loss, so the conversion efficiency is high and the laser threshold is low.
(4) There are many output laser wavelengths: This is because the energy levels of rare earth ions are very rich and there are many kinds of rare earth ions.
(5) Tunability: Due to the wide energy level of rare earth ions, the fluorescence spectrum of glass fiber is wide.
(6) Because there is no optical lens in the resonant cavity of fiber laser, it has the advantages of no adjustment, no maintenance and high stability, which is incomparable to traditional lasers.
(7) The output of optical fiber makes the laser easily competent for various multi-dimensional arbitrary space processing applications, which makes the design of mechanical system very simple.
(8) Be competent for harsh working environment and have high tolerance to dust, vibration, impact, humidity and temperature.
(9) There is no need for thermoelectric refrigeration and water cooling, only simple air cooling is needed.
(10) High electro-optical efficiency: The comprehensive electro-optical efficiency is over 20%, which greatly saves power consumption and operating costs.
(1 1) High power, 6 kW commercial fiber laser.
2. Disadvantages of fiber laser
(1) Optical fiber is expensive.
(2) Fiber materials are easy to break.
(3) Because the core of optical fiber is very small. Compared with solid-state laser, its single pulse energy is very small.