A solid-state laser system includes a gain medium having an optical resonator defined therein. The gain medium is co-doped with first and second active elements. The first active element is Er.sup.3+ and the second active element is Ho.sup.3+ or Dy.sup.3+. The solid-state laser system also includes a pump source coupled to the gain medium for pumping the gain medium with pump light.

In accordance with an example embodiment, a laser arrangement is provided, the laser arrangement comprising a light source for generating light output; a collimator assembly for collimating the light output from the light source into a pump beam; an optical resonator assembly for generating pulsed output beam based on the pump beam directed thereat; and a beam displacement assembly for laterally shifting the pump beam to adjust the position at which the pump beam meets a surface of the optical resonator assembly.

A system, device, and method for laser cooling rare earth doped silica glass using anti-Stokes fluorescence is disclosed. The system includes a rare earth doped and codoped with one or more codopants silica glass; a laser that provides radiation to a first surface and through a body of the rare earth doped silica glass, wherein the laser is tuned from a first wavelength to a second wavelength; and a thermally sensitive device that captures images of the rare earth doped silica glass as the laser is tuned and determines a third wavelength between the first wavelength and the second wavelength where the rare earth doped silica glass is maximumly or near maximumly cooled.

A system includes a light transmitter configured to emit a first light beam. The first light beam includes a primary portion and an amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) portion. The system also includes a host material configured to receive the first light beam and emit a second light. The host material is configured to generate the second light by depopulation of chromophores of one or more dopants in the host material caused by energy of the primary portion of the first light beam. The second light is continuous wave and speckle free.

A new type of all-silica optical fiber is described; a Structured Silica Clad Silica (SSCS) optical fiber, whose cladding is structured to provide mode mixing within the core; and/or to have an average effective refractive index. Its cross-section is essentially symmetrical, it can be used, among other objects, to provide flatter, more speckle-free outputs from fiber lasers, or other limited mode photonic sources. Building the new fiber structure around a rare earth doped laser core provides a better fiber laser/amplifier for cladding pumping. The structured silica cladding contains paired layers, in which a down doped silica layer is followed by a layer of pure, or lesser down-doped, or even up-dope silica, and die number of paired layers is, typically, from 5 to about 25, and, generally, within the paired layers the ratio of thickness of the higher RI layer of silicate the down-doped silica is very broad, lying between about 0.0625 to about 16, depending on the intended use of the SSCS fibers. In some versions, the main core material can be up-doped silica with pure silica or down-doped silica as the primary second component.

A rare earth-doped optical fiber comprises a fluorosilicate core surrounded by a silica cladding, where the fluorosilicate core comprises an alkaline-earth fluoro-alumino-silicate glass, such as a strontium fluoro-alumino-silicate glass. The rare earth-doped optical fiber may be useful as a high-power fiber laser and/or fiber amplifier. A method of making a rare earth-doped optical fiber comprises: inserting a powder mixture comprising YbF.sub.3, SrF.sub.2, and Al.sub.2O.sub.3 into a silica tube; after inserting the powder mixture, heating the silica tube to a temperature of at least about 2000° C., some or all of the powder mixture undergoing melting; drawing the silica tube to obtain a reduced-diameter fiber; and cooling the reduced-diameter fiber. Thus, a rare earth-doped optical fiber comprising a fluorosilicate core surrounded by a silica cladding is formed.

A method for producing rare earth metal-doped quartz glass includes the steps of (a) providing a blank of the rare earth metal-doped quartz glass, and (b) homogenizing the blank by softening the blank zone by zone in a heating zone and by twisting the softened zone along a rotation axis. Some rare earth metals, however, show a discoloration of the quartz glass, which hints at an unforeseeable and undesired change in the chemical composition or possibly at an inhomogeneous distribution of the dopants. To avoid this drawback and to provide a modified method which ensures the production of rare earth metal-doped quartz glass with reproducible properties, during homogenization according to method step (b), the blank is softened under the action of an oxidizingly acting or a neutral plasma.

A gain mirror is created for use as an optical amplifier in a solid state ring laser rotation sensor. Such a ring laser includes at least three mirrors for reflecting counter propagating laser beams around a closed loop optical path, wherein at least one of the mirrors is a gain mirror. The gain mirror is formed by applying a thin film of silica, a few half wavelengths thick and doped with Nd isotopes, onto a very high reflectivity mirror and then using a laser diode to pump it with intense light to form a population inversion in Nd.sup.3+ ions. An assembly consisting of this gain mirror and a pump laser diode can be used as an optical amplifier in a solid state ring laser to generate the two counter propagating laser light beams needed to measure rotation.

Systems, methods, and other embodiments for a new compact narrowband diode-pumped solid-state laser device enabled by Volume Bragg Grating (VBG) technology and capable of operating at the watt or higher output power level. This laser is stable, operates in a transverse electromagnetic (TEM) output mode, and with a single-narrowband (<1 kHz FWHM) longitudinal mode with acceptable relative intensity noise (RIN) performance from 1-100 GHz. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, the TEM output mode is a TEM.sub.00 Gaussian output mode.

Examples of the present invention include integrated erbium-doped waveguide lasers designed for silicon photonic systems. In some examples, these lasers include laser cavities defined by distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) formed in silicon nitride-based waveguides. These DBRs may include grating features defined by wafer-scale immersion lithography, with an upper layer of erbium-doped aluminum oxide deposited as the final step in the fabrication process. The resulting inverted ridge-waveguide yields high optical intensity overlap with the active medium for both the 980 nm pump (89%) and 1.5 μm laser (87%) wavelengths with a pump-laser intensity overlap of over 93%. The output powers can be 5 mW or higher and show lasing at widely-spaced wavelengths within both the C- and L-bands of the erbium gain spectrum (1536, 1561 and 1596 nm).