Study on the power scalability of all-fiber superfluorescent source operating near 980 nm

The high-power all-fiber superfluorescent source operating near 980 nm is studied experimentally and numerically. In experiment, an all-fiber superfluorescent source operating near 980 nm is fabricated with the distributed side-coupled cladding-pumping (DSCCP) Yb-doped fiber (YDF). By optimizing the active fiber and angle-cleaving of the output port, a recorded 17.1-W output power and 14.6% slope efficiency of 980-nm ASE are obtained. No parasitic laser oscillation is observed at the maximum output power. The power scalability of the source is also numerically investigated. A simple but effective method is present to numerically determine the threshold of parasitic laser oscillation. It is found that the output power can be scaled up to 50 W and 100 W with the optical feedback of each output port suppressed to 1.2 × 10^-6 and 7 × 10^-7, respectively. It is also revealed that coupling coefficient should be larger than 6 to realize more than 50% slope efficiency. These results provide significant guidance for understanding and designing the high-power superfluorescent Yb-doped source (SYFS) operating near 980 nm and other sorts of three-level fiber sources.