Stimulated Brillouin scattering suppression with a chirped laser seed: comparison of dynamical model to experimental data

Abstract

When scaling CW single-mode fiber amplifiers to high power, the first nonlinear limitation that appears for narrowlinewidth seed lasers is stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). We present a dynamical simulation of Brillouin scattering in a Yb-doped fiber amplifier that numerically solves the differential equations in z and t describing the laser, Stokes and pump waves, the inversion, and the density fluctuations that seed the scattering process. We compare the model to experimental data, and show that a linearly chirped seed laser is an efficient form of SBS suppression; especially for long delivery fibers. The frequency chirp decreases the interaction length by chirping through the Brillouin resonance in a time that is short compared to the fiber transit time. The seed has a highly linear chirp of 10^(14) – 10^(16) Hz/s at 1064 nm which preserves a well-defined phase relationship in time. This method of SBS suppression retains a long effective coherence length for purposes of coherent combining, while at high chirps appears to the SBS as a large linewidth, increasing the threshold. An increase in fiber length increases the laser bandwidth as seen by the SBS, leading to a fiberlength-independent SBS threshold.

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