Specialty optical fiber materials and fabrication techniques for lasers

Fiber laser are intrinsically limited by numerous nonlinear phenomena. This talk described suppression approaches based on compositional engineering of the glasses from which the fibers are made. Threshold values for two parasitic phenomena, Brillouin scattering and TMI, have are shown herein to have dependencies that, at some composition or range of compositions, can be zeroed. Example glass systems are presented that satisfy these conditions. In summary, a materials approach to the mitigation of high energy laser parasitic effects is shown to be a powerful and preferred method in comparison to the present focus on waveguide design.