Design of an Efficient Pumping Scheme for Mid-IR Dy³⁺:Ga₅Ge₂₀Sb₁₀S₆₅ PCF Fiber Laser

Abstract

This letter illustrates the design of a novel medium infrared (Mid-IR) laser based on a photonic crystal fiber made of dysprosium-doped chalcogenide glass, Dy 3+ :Ga 5 Ge 20 Sb 10 S 65. In order to perform a realistic investigation, the simulation is performed by taking into account the spectroscopic parameters measured on the rare earth-doped glass sample. The simulated results show that an optical beam emission close to 4400-nm wavelength can be obtained by employing two pump beams at 2850 nm (pump #1) and 4092 nm (pump #2) wavelengths. The pump beams can be provided by commercial quantum cascade lasers. As example, for the pump powers of 50 mW (pump #1) and 1 W (pump #2), the input mirror reflectivity of 99%, the output mirror reflectivity of 30%, and the optical cavity length of 50 cm, a signal power close to 350 mW at the wavelength of 4384 nm can be generated. This result indicates that the designed source configuration is feasible for high beam quality Mid-IR light generation and it is efficient enough to find applications in optical free propagation links, optical remote sensing, and medicine.

Modelling and Design of Lanthanide Ion-Doped Chalcogenide Fiber Lasers: Progress towards the Practical Realization of the First MIR Chalcogenide Fiber Laser

“…More recent studies have concentrated on the improvement of the lasing efficiency, while finding alternatives to the cascade pumping scheme [29][30][31][32]. In [31], use of dual pump was proposed to bring the lasing efficiency above 20%.…”

“…In [31], use of dual pump was proposed to bring the lasing efficiency above 20%. Dysprosium ion doping was applied, and pumps with wavelengths of 2850 nm and 4092 nm were used.…”

Advances in Mid-IR Fiber Lasers: Tellurite, Fluoride and Chalcogenide

“…Dy 3+ ions in chalcogenide glass have also been extensively investigated [8][9][10][11]13,34,35] in order to obtain laser emission in the wavelength range Δλ between λ = 4.1 μm and λ = 4.6 μm by exploiting the 6 H11/2 → 6 H13/2 transition. However, the long lifetime of the lower laser manifold and the low pump absorption rate are the two major drawbacks limiting the lasing efficiency.…”

“…In [36], mid infrared emission in the 4.3-6.0 µ m wavelength range for a Tb 3+ -doped selenide glass was investigated. A Judd-Ofelt analysis was performed in order to obtain the radiative transition In [35], a different approach, based on the employment of QCLs, was adopted. The simulated PCF had the same physical and geometrical parameters.…”

Determining the refractive index dispersion and thickness of hot-pressed chalcogenide thin films from an improved Swanepoel method

“…The properties of mid-infrared (MIR) transparency, high refractive index, low phonon energy, high optical non-linearity (Zakery and Elliott 2003), and an ability to doped them with rare-earth element ions (Sanghera and Aggarwal 1999;Sanghera et al 2009;Tang et al 2015;Falconi et al 2016), make chalcogenide glasses attractive for use in planar photonic integrated circuits (Seddon et al 2006Abdel-Moneim et al 2015), and narrow-and broad-band fibre-based laser sources (Petersen et al 2014) and amplifiers (Hu et al 2015;Falconi et al 2017) for the MIR. Although much research effort has been paid to the development and characterisation of chalcogenide glasses for photonics, relatively little refractive index dispersion data are presently available at MIR wavelengths, see for example: Orava et al (2009), Qiao et al (2011), Dantanarayana et al (2014), Gleason et al (2016), Wang et al (2017) and references therein.…”