Co-Doped Optical Fiber Lasers

Aerosol techniques for the incorporation of rare dopants into optical fiber preforms have been developed. This enables us to obtain liquid precursors that have a high degree of homogeneity at the molecular level, thus inhibiting phase separation in the final rare earth doped glass. This offers the possibility of convenient co-doping of optical fiber lasers using the Modified Chemical Vapor Deposition MCVD process. In this work, we describe how this process is utilized to study combinations of rare earth dopants, in particular, Nd and Er, so that lasing at discrete wavelengths may be obtained in the same cavity. This may have implications of new types of optical fiber gas sensors that are being developed. In addition, multiple cavity lasing can also be of interest for new classes of high power optical fiber lasers pumped by recently available stripe diodes.