The increasing output-power levels of rare-earth-doped fiber lasers and amplifiers are enabling these sources to displace conventional lasers in a growing variety of applications. At the same time, experimentally demonstrated pulsed fiber amplifiers with multimegawatt peak powers are approaching ultimate power limits on fiber amplifiers imposed by self-focusing within the fiber (see figure). Therefore, accurate and reliable modeling of this behavior becomes increasingly essential to the design of practical devices in which self-focusing can significantly influence not only attainable peak power (and hence pulse energy), but also the spectrum (via nonlinear processes in the fiber), the damage threshold, and the beam quality.
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