ISLA 2 micron fiber laser project concludes with several technical advances
The European Union-funded ISLA (Integrated Disruptive Components for 2 µm Fibre Laser) project has concluded with positive results. Gooch & Housego (G&H; Ilminster, England) was project coordinator with project partners Rofin Sinar (Hamburg, Germany), II-VI Laser Enterprises (Saxonburg, PA); JDSU (Milpitas, CA) the University of Southampton (Southampton, England); Trinity College, Dublin; and Vivid Components (Southampton, England). Since 2011, the project team says ISLA has had a major impact on the development of components for 2 µm fiber lasers. Among the major advances made in the project were:
- Thulium fibers with 70% slope efficiency at >100 W output
- Holmium fibers with 75% slope efficiency
- Amplitude modulators and tunable filters
- Fiber-coupled isolators, pump combiners and low loss taps
- Wavelength-flattened couplers
- Fiber coupled silicon pulse pickers
- Graphene-based modelockers
- 793 nm diodes > 38 W in 105 µm fiber with 0.15 NA demonstrated
- Wavelength-stabilized 793 nm diodes with 60% power conversion efficiency
The project culminated in a workshop held on 26 June 2015 after Laser World of Photonics, Munich. Slides from this event, summarizing the technology developed in the project, and including a range of presentations from external speakers on applications for 2 µm lasers, may be found on the project website at http://isla-project.eu/.
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With the project completed, work continues at The Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) in Southampton, England to build a 0.5 kW continuous-wave 2 µm fiber laser based on ISLA components. This will be characterized at the ORC, and then transferred for industrial testing at the ROFIN Laser Applications Laboratory in Hamburg.
G&H has commercialized a large number of the products developed for ISLA, including fused fiber devices, acousto-optic filters, and modulators.
SOURCE: Gooch & Housego and the ISLA project; http://goochandhousego.com/ and http://isla-project.eu/
Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.