High-power tunable grating-free cascaded Raman fiber lasers

Cascaded Raman lasers enable high powers at various wavelength bands inaccessible with conventional fiber lasers. However, the input and output wavelengths are fixed by the multitude of fiber gratings in the system providing feedback. In this work, we demonstrate a high power, tunable, grating-free cascaded Raman fiber laser with an output power of >30W and a continuous tuning range from 1440nm to 1520nm. This corresponds to the entire in-band pumping region of Erbium doped gain media. Our system is enabled by three novel aspects - A grating free feedback mechanism for Raman lasers, a filter fiber to terminate the Raman cascade at the required wavelength band and a tunable high-power Ytterbium doped fiber laser as input. In this work, the primary system is a novel, cascaded Raman conversion module which is completely color blind to the input pump source and does wavelength band conversion at high efficiency. In addition, the conversion module also provides high spectral purity of greater than 85% at the required wavelength by terminating the cascade using high distributed losses provided by specialty Raman filter fibers. Using a high-power Ytterbium doped fiber laser continuously tuned from 1060nm to 1100nm and Raman filter fiber with distributed loss beyond 1520nm, we achieve a continuously tunable 1440nm to 1520nm laser corresponding to 5th or 6th Raman Stokes shift of the input. To the best of our knowledge, the reported powers at these wavelengths have been the highest for tunable Raman fiber lasers and is currently only limited by the input power.