We fabricate a pair of fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) by a visible femtosecond laser phase mask scanning technique on passive large-mode-area double-cladding fibers for multi-kilowatt fiber oscillators. The bandwidth of high-reflection (HR) and low-reflection (LR) FBG is ∼1.6nm and 0.3 nm, respectively. The reflection of the HR-FBG is higher than 99%, and that of the LR-FBG is about 10%. A bidirectional pumped all-fiber oscillator is constructed using this pair of FBGs, a record output power of 5027 W located in the signal core is achieved with a slope efficiency of ∼82.1%, and the beam quality factor M² is measured to be ∼1.6 at the maximum power. The FBGs are simply fixed on a water cooling plate without a special package, and the thermal efficiency of the HR-FBG and the LR-FBG is 2.76°C/kW and 1°C/kW, respectively. Our research provides an effective solution for robust high-power all-fiber laser oscillators.

Side pumping combiners are widely used in fiber laser schemes for their high coupling efficiency, low insertion loss, and multi-point pumping capability. However, side pumping combiners perform differently in coupling efficiency when pumping with a laser diode (LD) and a high-brightness 1018 nm Yb-doped fiber laser (YDFL). In this paper, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we investigated the different parameters to fabricate the (2+1)×1 combiner with high coupling efficiency when pumping with an LD and a YDFL, respectively. After optimization, the maximum coupled pump power from one single-pump port of the combiner was 1200 W and 2730 W when pumping with a LD and a YDFL, respectively.

We propose here a novel method for position fixing in the micron scale by combining the convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture and speckle patterns generated in a multimode fiber. By varying the splice offset between a single mode fiber and a multimode fiber, speckles with different patterns can be generated at the output of the multimode fiber. The CNN is utilized to learn these specklegrams and then predict the offset coordinate. Simulation results show that predicted positions with the precision of 2 μm account for 98.55%. This work provides a potential high-precision two-dimensional positioning method.

We demonstrate an ultra-narrow-band optical filter based on a hybrid-microsphere consisting of a coated SiO2 microsphere. As compared to the SiO2 microsphere, the hybrid-microsphere produces a quality factor of >108, a transmission spectrum bandwidth of <1 pm, and an increased side-mode suppression ratio. The microsphere surface roughness and whispering gallery mode (WGM) transmission spectra are measured experimentally. A 0.01 nm bandwidth, single-wavelength fiber laser output is achieved with a tunable wavelength, using the SiO2 microsphere as the mode selector. The optical field distribution and WGM transmission spectrum of the hybrid-microsphere with different coating parameters are theoretically investigated by the finite-difference time-domain method.