Tutorial

Tutorial:  Overview of Fiber Lasers Dr. William Torruellas, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab

Fiber laser technology has the potential to make a significant impact in various applications, from LIDAR and remote sensing through to high energy laser weapons systems. This emerging laser technology offers many intrinsic advantages over traditional solid state or gas lasers, as highlighted by widespread publications in the research community demonstrating an impressive array of power scaling results, both CW and pulsed and at wavelengths from 1um to the eyesafe 1.5mm and now 2mm wavelengths. Obvious advantages associated with the technology are high wall plug efficiency leading to reduced electrical power requirements and easier system cooling, but also robustness, good beam quality and highly flexible system performance coupled with (remote) fiber delivery options make the technology unique in certain applications.

This tutorial will provide an overview of the recent advances in fiber laser technology as well as a description of what the future technology roadmap in this field might look like.
It will cover the fundamentals and relevant aspects of designing and building a fiber laser—from the fiber itself—through the various state of the art fiber components and discuss the system parameter space that best makes use of the intrinsic advantages of the technology.

Speaker’s Bio

William E. Torruellas received his PhD from the Optical Sciences Center, University of Arizona in 1991. He is currently a member of the senior professional staff at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. His work addresses the design of High-Energy-Lasers and their system development and field implementation for Directed-Energy-Weapon systems. He is also involved in active remote sensing evaluations. Previously he was Director of Fiber Optronics for Fibertek, focusing his work on double-cladding fiber amplifiers and transferring terrestrial WDM systems technology to the area of IR remote sensing and space based laser systems. Previous industry positions include Corvis and Raytheon; additionally, he was a senior research associate for CREOL and an assistant professor at Washington State University, where he helped establish an inter-departmental M.Sc in Opto-Electronics supported by the National Science Foundation. He has 51 refereed publications and 30 conference proceedings, one awarded patent, 55 invited talks, and 60 contributed oral presentations. He has been involved in the organization of conferences for SPIE and OSA, and has co-edited a book on nonlinear propagation.