Lou Qihong

Improved adhesion of diamond coating on cobalt-cemented tungsten carbide hardmetal by using pulsed-UV-laser substrate surface pretreatment

Abstract Pulsed-UV-laser surface ablation has been applied in substrate pretreatment in order to obtain good adhesion of diamond coating grown on cobalt-cemented tungsten carbide hardmetal. The dependence of diamond coating’s adhesion on different shots of pulsed-UV-laser substrate pretreatment has been studied experimentally. The results were compared with diamond coating deposited by using traditional acid-etching substrate pretreatment. It was shown that adhesion of diamond coating grown on tungsten carbide hardmetal has been greatly improved by using pulsed-UV-laser substrate pretreatment. The corresponding laser pretreatment condition for the optimal adhesion of diamond coatings was finally obtained. It has been demonstrated that pulsed-UV-laser substrate pretreatment should be a feasible and effective method for improving adhesion of diamond coating on cobalt-cemented tungsten carbide hardmetal. It is the characteristic surface morphology produced by pulsed-UV-laser surface ablation that subsequently results in this improved adhesion of diamond coating grown on tungsten carbide hardmetal. The number of laser shots being used in substrate pretreatment has a great influence to the adhesion of diamond coating deposited on tungsten carbide hardmetal. One should always apply proper number of laser shots in pulsed-UV-laser substrate pretreatment when seeking for the optimal adhesion of diamond coating on tungsten carbide hardmetal. In this work, the corresponding number of laser shots for the optimal adhesion of diamond coating has found to be 300 laser shots.

High Power Passive Phase Locking of Four Yb-Doped Fiber Amplifiers by an All-Optical Feedback Loop

We report the passive phase locking of four high power Yb-doped fiber amplifiers with ring cavity. The interference patterns at different output power are observed and the Strehl ratios are measured. The maximum coherent output power of the fiber array is up to 1062 W by multi-stage amplification. The stable beam profiles of various phase relationships are observed by controlling the position of the feedback fiber, in good agreement with the calculated results. By using master oscillator power-amplifier (MOPA) architecture and broadband operation of passively phased systems, higher power scaling with high beam quality appears to be feasible.

Beam quality improvement of laser diode array by using off-axis external cavity

A novel off-axis external cavity is designed for laser diode array to improve the beam quality. In this external cavity, a circle aperture with variable size is used as a spatial filter. The diameter of aperture is optimized to 1.2mm and the off-axis angle of external cavity is optimized at 2.6 deg. In the optimal case, the beam parameter product (BPP) of laser diode array is reduced to 121 mm.mrad from 1050 mm.mrad with external cavity optical efficiency of 81%.

A 115-W Ytterbium-Doped Fibre Laser

We report a highly efficient ytterbium-doped double-clad fibre laser, one-end pumped by a 975-nm diode stack source and generating up to 115.6 W of cw output power at 1.1 μm. The maximum optical-to-optical conversion efficiency with respect to the launched pump power is 79% at 65-W output power, and the overall slope efficiency is about 69%.

The Improved Power of the Central Lobe in the Beam Combination and High Power Output

In order to increase the power fraction of the central lobe in the coherent beam combination of lasers in an array, the effects of the distance factor of near-field distribution on far-field interference patterns are calculated and demonstrated experimentally. An improved beam array of interwoven distribution is demonstrated to enable the power in the central lobe to reach 41%. An optimized mirror array is carefully designed to obtain a high duty ratio, which is up to 53.3% at a high power level. By using these optimized methods and designs, the passive phase locking of eight Yb-doped fiber amplifiers with ring cavities are obtained, and a pleasing interference pattern with 87% visibility is observed. The maximum coherent output power of the system is up to 1066 W.

Controllable Dual-Wavelength Fiber Laser

We demonstrate a controllable dual-wavelength fiber laser which contains a master laser and a slave laser. The master laser is a kind of ring cavity laser which can be injected into by the slave laser. The output laser wavelength is controlled by injected power of the slave laser; both single- and dual-wavelength operation can be achieved. Under free running, the master laser generates 1064 nm laser output. Here the slave laser is a 1072 nm fiber laser. The 1064 nm and 1072 nm laser coexist in output spectrum for relatively low injected power. Dual-wavelength and power-ratio-tunable operation can be achieved. If the injected power of the slave laser is high enough, the 1064 nm laser is extinguished automatically and there is only 1072 nm laser output.

Compact All-Fiber 102 W Picosecond MOPA Laser with a Narrow Spectral Linewidth

We report an all-fiber-based master oscillator power amplifier picosecond ytterbium-doped fiber laser with an average power of 102 W and a spectral line width of 0.1 nm. The seed source is a compact single mode passively mode-locked fiber laser with an average power of 2.48 W. Finally, the laser maximum average output power of 102 W picosecond pulses is realized by a direct all-fiber amplifier structure in one stage. The experiment enables the optical-to-optical conversion efficiency to reach 61.4%, with the central wavelength of 1063.7nm. A significant feature of this experiment is the spectral line width of 0.1nm. The spectrum has no broadening or nonlinear effects when the pump is strengthened.

Kilohertz Electro-Optic Q-Switched Nd:YAG Ceramic Laser

We investigate the lasing characteristics of a laser-diode-array side-pumped electro-optic Q-switched Nd:Y3Al5O12 ceramic laser operating at 1000 Hz pulse repetition rate. Using a YAG polycrystalline rod with Nd3+ concentration of 1 at.% as the gain medium, pumping with 808 nm laser-diode-arrays, the Q-switched laser output at 1064 nm wavelength with 23 mJ pulse energy and less than 12 ns FWHM pulse width are obtained at a pumping power of about 400 W, the slope efficiency is around 15%, the output beam divergence angle is about 1.2 mrad.

Effects of space duty cycle on the characteristics of fiber laser coherent beam combination

The characteristics of fiber laser coherent beam combination are investigated by using a 2×2 fiber laser array with a self-Fourier cavity. The experimental results show that with a certain output width the power ratio of the center spot is increased with the increase of space duty cycle, meanwhile the number of secondary spots is decreased correspondingly. The results are in agreement with theoretic analysis.

Generation of 1 ns excimer laser output pulse by direct wave clipping

In this article, a 1 ns excimer laser pulse was obtained successfully from an ultraviolet preionized XeCl laser using a direct wave-clipping technique with some improvements over the conventional scheme in consideration of obtaining more suitable discharge and steeper front edge of original light pulse. The effects of laser operation stability and optical setup of the experiment scheme on output characteristics are discussed.