Optical design of a high power fiber optic coupler.

摘要

Fiber optic beam delivery systems are replacing conventional mirror delivery systems for many reasons (e.g., system flexibility and redundancy, stability, and ease of alignment). Commercial products are available that use of fiber optic delivery for laser surgery and materials processing. Also, pump light of dye lasers can be delivered by optical fibers. Many laser wavelengths have been transported via optical fibers; high power delivery has been reported for argon, Nd:YAG, and excimer. We have been developing fiber optic beam delivery systems for copper vapor laser light; many of the fundamental properties of these systems are applicable to other high power delivery applications. A key element of fiber optic beam delivery systems is the coupling of laser light into the optical fiber. For our application this optical coupler must be robust to a range of operating parameters and laser characteristics. We have access to a high power copper vapor laser beam that is generated by a master oscillator/power amplifier (MOPA) chain comprised of three amplifiers. The light has a pulse width of 40--50 nsec with a repetition rate of about 4 kHz. The average power (nominal) to be injected into a fiber is 200 W. (We will refer to average power in this paper.) In practice, the laser beam's direction and collimation change with time. These characteristics plus other mechanical and operational constraints make it difficult for our coupler to be opto-mechanically referenced to the laser beam. We describe specifications, design, and operation of an optical system that couples a high-power copper vapor laser beam into a large core, multimode fiber. The approach used and observations reported are applicable to fiber optic delivery applications. 6 refs., 6 figs.