As a major limitation for power scaling of high power narrow linewidth fiber master oscillator power amplifiers (MOPAs), Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) induced self-pulsing in polarization maintaining (PM) fiber amplifiers is well characterized and analyzed in this paper by comparing different white noise signal (WNS) phase-modulated modes in experiments. It is found that the self-pulsing effect is not observed in the PM-amplifier with single-frequency laser seed injection, and cascaded WNS modulation provides superior self-pulsing suppression than single WNS modulation with similar output linewidth. Moreover, the experimental results indicate that the self-pulsing threshold can hardly be predicted only by the output linewidth or the defined SBS threshold in a WNS phase modulated fiber amplifier system. As self-pulsing is originated from the spectral spikes in WNS modulated system, we theoretically analyzed characteristics of these spikes in different phase-modulation modes. It indicates the spectral peak intensity can be reduced by cascaded modulation, for which self-pulsing can be suppressed. The theoretical predictions agree well with the experimental results. At the same time, in order to suppress the mode instability effect, a plum blossom shaped bending mode selection device is used in this high-power narrow linewidth fiber amplifier system. Finally, a 32 GHz cascaded WNSs modulated, over than 2.5 kW linearly polarized all-fiber amplifier with a slope efficiency of 86.7% is demonstrated. The polarization extinction ratio (PER) is measured larger than 14 dB and the beam quality factor M2 maintains lower than 1.3 in the power scaling process.

The dependence of the spectral broadening characteristics on the number of longitudinal modes is studied experimentally in a bi-directional pumping fiber amplifier. It is found that the linewidth of the amplifier decreases with reducing the longitudinal mode number of the seed source. In this work, we present a 68 pm-linewidth kilowatt-level fiber laser using a simple master oscillator power amplifier structure. Meanwhile, we theoretically analyze the spectral broadening characteristics of the seeds with different longitudinal mode number. The conclusions are agreement with the experimental results. This provides a simple and efficient method for obtaining of the high power narrow linewidth fiber laser used in spectral beam combining.

Coherent beam combining (CBC) of cylindrical vector beams (CVBs) based on an active phase controller is proposed and demonstrated. Experimentally, two pieces of spatially variant wave plates (S-wave plate) were employed as vector mode convertors for two individual 1064-nm fiber amplifier channels. When the system was in a closed loop, a combined output power of 10 W and a CBC efficiency of higher than 94% were achieved, for both TM₀₁ (radially polarized) mode and TE₀₁ (azimuthally polarized) mode cases. Moreover, the laser system showed a high vector mode purity, which was measured to be ∼97.4% (TM₀₁) and ∼97.3% (TE₀₁). To the best of knowledge, this could possibly be the first demonstration of CBC of CVBs, which paves the way for power scaling of CVBs.

We present a reliable and all-fiberized single-polarization, high-order mode fiber laser. The experimental setup employed polarization-maintaining ytterbium-doped fibers and a combination of different fiber Bragg gratings to achieve high mode purity and stable output. The system achieved a maximum output power of 3.8 W, a polarization extinction ratio (PER) of 96.7%, and a mode purity of 95.32% for the LP₁₁ mode. Furthermore, the laser demonstrated notable stability; during a 120 min stability test, the standard deviation of the output power was measured at 0.15%, while the standard deviation of the polarization extinction ratio (PER) was 0.07%. This work offers a reliable solution for the generation of stable, high-purity LP₁₁ mode lasers.