RESUMEN
We report what we believe to be the first radiation-balanced fiber amplifier-a device that provides optical gain while experiencing no temperature rise. The gain medium is a silica fiber with a 21-µm-diameter core highly doped with Yb^{3+} (2.52 wt. %) and codoped with 2.00 wt. % Al to reduce concentration quenching. The amplifier is core pumped with 1040-nm light to create anti-Stokes fluorescence cooling and gain in the core at 1064 nm. Using a custom slow-light fiber Bragg grating sensor with mK resolution, temperature measurements are performed at multiple locations along the amplifier fiber. A 4.35-m fiber pumped with 2.62 W produced 17 dB of gain, while the average fiber temperature remained slightly below room temperature. This advancement is a fundamental step toward the creation of ultrastable lasers necessary to many applications, especially low-noise sensing and high-precision metrology.
RESUMEN
Laser cooling in silica has recently been demonstrated, but there is still a lack of understanding on how fiber composition, core size, and OH- contamination influence cooling performance. In this work, six Yb-doped silica fibers were studied to illuminate the influence of these parameters. The best fiber cooled by -70mK with only 170 mW/m of absorbed pump power at 1040 nm, which corresponds to twice as much heat extracted per unit length compared to the first reported laser cooling in silica. This new fiber has an extremely low OH- loss and a higher Al concentration (2.0 wt.% Al), permitting a high Yb concentration (2.52 wt.% Yb) without incurring significant quenching. Strong correlations were found between the absorptive loss responsible for heating and the loss measured at 1380 nm due to absorption by OH-.
RESUMEN
For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, laser cooling is reported in a silica optical fiber. The fiber has a 21-µm diameter core doped with 2.06 wt.% ${{\rm Yb}^{3 + }}$Yb3+ and co-doped with ${{\rm Al}_2}{{\rm O}_3}$Al2O3 and ${{\rm F}^ - }$F- to increase the critical quenching concentration by a factor of 16 over the largest reported values for the Yb-doped silica. Using a custom slow-light fiber Bragg grating sensor, temperature changes up to $ - {50}\;{\rm mK}$-50mK were measured with 0.33 W/m of absorbed pump power per unit length at 1040 nm. The measured dependencies of the temperature change on the pump power and the pump wavelength are in excellent agreement with predictions from an existing model, and they reflect the fiber's groundbreaking quality for the radiation-balanced fiber lasers.
RESUMEN
For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, optical cooling is demonstrated in a fiber at atmospheric pressure. Using a specialized slow-light fiber Bragg grating temperature sensor, -5.2 mK and -0.65 K were measured in a single-mode (1% YbF3) and multimode (3% YbF3) ZBLAN fiber with respective cooling efficiencies of 2.2% and 0.90%. Fitting a recently reported quantitative model of optical cooling in fibers to the measured temperature change dependence on the pump power per unit length validates the model and allows us to infer the fibers' absorptive loss and quenching lifetime, key parameters that are scarce in literature. These values are necessary for accurate cooling predictions and will aid in the development of fibers for application in optical coolers and radiation-balanced lasers.
