What is Fiber Laser and How Does It Work?
What is Fiber Laser and How Does It Work?
The word LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and the first-ever laser was built in 1960 by Theodore H. Maiman, an American engineer and physicist who received numerous awards for his invention. However, it was Elias Snitzer who, in 1961, demonstrated the first optical fiber laser and fiber amplifier.
Since then, fiber laser technology has only evolved to encompass a diversity of uses in many fields, including industry, medicine, and telecommunications.
Fiber laser is a type of laser which uses fiber doped with rare-earth elements (erbium, thulium, ytterbium) etc. as active laser medium. This differentiates the fiber laser to other types of laser available on the market, where the active laser medium is a crystal (e.g. disk laser) or gas (e.g. CO2 laser).
Fiber lasers provide absolute efficiency, precisely control speed and power through accurate management of the beam length, duration, intensity, and heat output.
How Does Fiber Laser Work?
First, laser diodes from a power source transform electricity into photons. So, they basically create light which is then pumped into a fiber-optic cable.
But if not controlled by a specific mechanism, light will go in every direction and we have seen how narrow and focused a laser beam is. We’ll get there, but first we need to understand how light travels through the fiber optic cable.
- The core is the conduit through which light travels. It’s made of silica glass and coated with rare earth elements (in this case, Ytterbium) and has a high refractive index.
- The cladding is the layer surrounding the core with a low refractive index.
- The coating is a thicker plastic layer that acts as a buffer to absorb shocks and prevent the core from bending.
All lasers have three key elements in common: An excitation source, a gain medium, and a resonator. The excitation source uses externally supplied power to put a gain medium into an excited state. This excited state of a laser medium is characterized by a so-called population inversion, which enables the medium to amplify light due to a physical process called stimulated emission, first described by Albert Einstein (LASER = “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). Fiber bragg gratings inside the fiber act as mirrors around the gain medium to form an optical resonator, which on the one hand traps optical energy inside the resonator for further amplification, but also enables the out-coupling of a certain part of the optical energy in one direction by means of a partially transparent mirror. This out-coupled part of the optical energy is the laser beam that can be used for various purposes.
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