A high-power fiber laser produces a compound output beam having a center beam and an annular beam. The center beam and the annular beam are independently adjustable in power and wavelength. The output beam is delivered from an output optical fiber having a center core and a concentric annular core. A fundamental beam generated by a seed laser is amplified by a fiber amplifier and partially converted to a second-harmonic beam by a second-harmonic generator. The residual fundamental beam and second-harmonic beam are separated, attenuated, and selectively coupled into the cores of the output optical fiber.

A high-power laser beam with an arbitrary intensity profile is produced. Such beam has a variety of uses including for laser materials processing such as powder bed fusion additive manufacturing. Several challenges in additive manufacturing are mitigated with the present non-uniform intensity laser profiles. Nonuniform shapes include a set of intensity pixels in a line that could print a wide stripe area instead of just a single line. One example uses the multimode interference pattern from the output of a ribbon fiber which is imaged onto a work piece. The interference pattern is controlled to allow turning on or off of pixels along a line which can be used to shape the beam and form the additively manufactured part.

A fiber includes a core and cladding, both of which may have temperature dependent indices of refraction. The materials and size of the core and cladding may be selected such that as the temperature of the core and/or cladding is heated above room temperature, the fiber transitions from supporting multimode optical waveguiding to supporting single mode waveguiding.

An optical apparatus includes one or more pump sources situated to provide laser pump light, and a gain fiber optically coupled to the one or more pump sources, the gain fiber including an actively doped core situated to produce an output beam, an inner cladding and outer cladding surrounding the doped core and situated to propagate pump light, and a polymer cladding surrounding the outer cladding and situated to guide a selected portion of the pump light coupled into the inner and outer claddings of the gain fiber. Methods of pumping a fiber sources include generating pump light from one or more pump sources, coupling the pump light into a glass inner cladding and a glass outer cladding of a gain fiber of the fiber source such that a portion of the pump light is guided by a polymer cladding surrounding the glass outer cladding, and generating a single-mode output beam from the gain fiber.

An apparatus includes an optical fiber configured to transport an optical signal. A cross-section of the optical fiber has a longer slow-axis dimension and a shorter fast-axis dimension. The optical fiber includes a core configured to receive and amplify the optical signal, end features optically coupled to the core at opposite ends of the core, and a cladding surrounding the core and end features. The core has a height in the slow-axis dimension and a width in the fast-axis dimension. Each end feature has a height in the slow-axis dimension and a width in the fast-axis dimension. The core has a lower bend loss than the end features. The optical fiber is configured to confine optical power of a fundamental mode in the core and allow optical power of higher-order mode(s) to leak from the core into the end features. Each end feature's height is less than the core's width.

An optical fiber includes a core that propagates a light that includes a wavelength of 1060 nm. The light propagates in the core at least in an LP01 mode and an LP11 mode. A difference between a propagation constant of the light in the LP01 mode and a propagation constant of the light in the LP11 mode is 2000 rad/m or smaller. The expression

[00001]$L\frac{.Math.M^2}{-2.Math.3.Math.7.Math.21.Math.0^{-6}.Math.+4.8.Math.1.Math.91.Math.0^{-3}}$

is satisfied, where L is a length, M.sup.2 is a beam quality of light, M.sup.2 is a deterioration amount of the beam quality of light due to propagation in the optical fiber.

The present disclosure relates to an optical waveguide system. The system has a first waveguide having a core-guide and a cladding material portion surrounding and encasing the core-guide to form a substantially D-shaped cross sectional profile with an exposed flat section running along a length thereof. The core-guide enables a core-guide mode for an optical pulse signal having a first characteristic, travelling through the core-guide. A material layer of non-linear material is used which forms a second waveguide. The material layer is disposed on the exposed flat section of the cladding material portion. The material layer forms a plasmonic device to achieve a desired coupling with the core-guide to couple optical energy travelling through the core-guide into the material layer to modify the optical energy travelling through the core-guide such that the optical energy travelling through the core-guide has a second characteristic different from the first characteristic.

A high-power fiber laser produces a compound output beam having a center beam and an annular beam. The center beam and the annular beam are independently adjustable in power and wavelength. The output beam is delivered from an output optical fiber having a center core and a concentric annular core. A fundamental beam generated by a seed laser is amplified by a fiber amplifier and partially converted to a second-harmonic beam by a second-harmonic generator. The residual fundamental beam and second-harmonic beam are separated, attenuated, and selectively coupled into the cores of the output optical fiber.

An optical fiber comprises a core having an elliptical cross section and a cladding having a circular cross section. The core has an ellipticity between 2 and 40. The core and the cladding have a common central axis with the core being enclosed by the cladding. The difference of a refractive index of the cladding to a refractive index of the core is between 110.sup.2 and 1.510.sup.1. A trench is located between the core and the cladding. The trench has a uniform width and encircles the core. The refractive index of the trench is lower than the refractive index of the cladding.

A uniform temperature profile is provided across the width of the core of a ribbon fiber laser or amplifier by the use of insulating elements at the core edges and a spatially variable gain in the fiber core. High average power ribbon fibers, enable a variety of applications such as practical laser cutting and beam combining.