A novel method to eliminate the symmetry dependence of fiber coils for shupe mitigation.

It is a well-known fact that interferometric fiber optic gyroscopes (IFOGs) are easily distorted by thermal effects and distortion results in the degradation of the performance of these sensors. Changing the fiber coil geometry, increasing the winding symmetry, adding fiber buffer layers around the fiber coil, using different modulation methods for multifunctional integrated optic chips, and using special types of fibers, such as photonic crystal fibers, are some alternative solutions for preventing this degradation. This paper, theoretically and experimentally, investigates not only how different types of fiber coil winding methods behave under different rates of temperature change but also presents a novel method, to the best of our knowledge, to eliminate the Shupe effect, without violating the simplest IFOG scheme. This method rules out the importance of the winding symmetry epochally and the need of any extra treatment for the fiber coil to increase the thermal performance of the system. Regardless of the symmetry of the fiber coil winding, the rate error due to the Shupe effect can be reduced to about ± 0 . 05 ∘ / h for any rate of temperature change with this new method according to the experimental results.

Fiber-optic gyroscope for the suppression of a Faraday-effect-induced bias error.

Inertial rotation sensors, interferometric fiber-optic gyroscopes (IFOGs), are widely used in military and industrial applications due to their high sensitivity and stability. In this Letter, a new, to the best of our knowledge, fiber coil design is proposed to reduce magnetic field sensitivity without adding any optical components or electronic algorithms to the IFOG system. It is shown that this design can be applied without disturbing the simplest IFOG structure. Considering the fact that the magnetic field has an invertible effect on polarization, the compensation of the Faraday-effect-induced bias error has been demonstrated theoretically and experimentally by allowing two different polarizations to travel inside the fiber coil. According to the experimental results, the bias error was reduced approximately 20 times from ±9.6∘/h/mT to ±0.5∘/h/mT.

High-power Yb-based all-fiber laser delivering 300 fs pulses for high-speed ablation-cooled material removal.

We report on a 72 W Yb all-fiber ultrafast laser system with 1.6 GHz intra-burst and 200 kHz burst repetition rate developed to demonstrate ablation-cooled material removal at high speeds. Up to 24 W is applied on Cu and Si samples with pulses of ∼300 fs, and record-high ablation efficiencies are obtained, compared to published results to date, despite using only ∼100 nJ pulses. Ablation speeds approaching 1 mm3/s are reported with 24 W of average power, limited by available laser power and beam scanning speed. More significantly, these results experimentally confirm the theoretically expected linear scaling of the ablation-cooled regime to higher average powers without sacrificing efficiency, which implies that further scaling is possible with further increases in laser power and scanning speeds.

Burst-mode thulium all-fiber laser delivering femtosecond pulses at a 1 GHz intra-burst repetition rate.

We report on the development of, to the best of our knowledge, the first ultrafast burst-mode laser system operating at a central wavelength of approximately 2 µm, where water absorption and, consequently, the absorption of most biological tissue is very high. The laser comprises a harmonically mode-locked 1-GHz oscillator, which, in turn, seeds a fiber amplifier chain. The amplifier produces 500 ns long bursts containing 500 pulses with 1 GHz intra-burst and 50 kHz inter-burst repetition rates, respectively, at an average power of 1 W, corresponding to 40 nJ pulse and 20 µJ burst energies, respectively. The entire system is built in an all-fiber architecture and implements dispersion management such that output pulses are delivered directly from a single-mode fiber with a duration of 340 fs without requiring any external compression. This gigahertz-repetition-rate system is intended for ablation-cooled laser material removal in the 2 µm wavelength region, which is interesting for laser surgery due to the exceptionally high tissue absorption at this wavelength.

Ablation-cooled material removal with ultrafast bursts of pulses.

The use of femtosecond laser pulses allows precise and thermal-damage-free removal of material (ablation) with wide-ranging scientific, medical and industrial applications. However, its potential is limited by the low speeds at which material can be removed and the complexity of the associated laser technology. The complexity of the laser design arises from the need to overcome the high pulse energy threshold for efficient ablation. However, the use of more powerful lasers to increase the ablation rate results in unwanted effects such as shielding, saturation and collateral damage from heat accumulation at higher laser powers. Here we circumvent this limitation by exploiting ablation cooling, in analogy to a technique routinely used in aerospace engineering. We apply ultrafast successions (bursts) of laser pulses to ablate the target material before the residual heat deposited by previous pulses diffuses away from the processing region. Proof-of-principle experiments on various substrates demonstrate that extremely high repetition rates, which make ablation cooling possible, reduce the laser pulse energies needed for ablation and increase the efficiency of the removal process by an order of magnitude over previously used laser parameters. We also demonstrate the removal of brain tissue at two cubic millimetres per minute and dentine at three cubic millimetres per minute without any thermal damage to the bulk.