High Power Fibre Lasers

The High Power Fibre Laser group, led by Prof Johan Nilsson is one of several groupings with a research interest in high-power fibre lasers and amplifiers at the Optoelectronics Research Centre.

Our research is focused on higher powers, new wavelengths, and new fibre designs for pulsed and cw applications in areas such as telecom, displays, and materials processing. We employ cladding-pumpingto reach high powers and use fibre Raman devices and crystals for wavelength conversion.

We work in close collaboration with the Silica Fibre Fabrication Group which fabricates the vast majority of the fibers we use. We also collaborate with a number of commercial and non-commercial partners (Collaborations), including the ORC spin-out company SPI Lasers.

High-power fiber lasers are powered by reliable, low-cost semiconductor pump lasers, and indeed feeds on the current rapid development of such sources. A crucial point for an efficient device is how efficiently we can launch the beam from the pump laser into the cladding-pumped fiber. Our in-house solutions to this are GT-wave fibers and diode beam-shaping technology.