A fiber laser or fibre laser is a laser in which the active gain medium is an optical fiber doped with rare-earth elements such as erbium, ytterbium, neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium, and thulium.
Unlike a conventional laser which is constructed from components such as mirrors, rods and lenses a fiber laser is an all bulk material device. The laser rod is effectively substituted by a length of doped active fiber several metres long. The rest of the components are also all fiber devices each of which are spliced together to form a laser resonator. An immediate advantage of this is that there is no need for alignment, adjustment or subsequent cleaning of optical surfaces once the laser has been built, which means little or no maintenance requirement.
Fiber Lasers can be supplied with patented Luminator, fiber-delivery options, laser processing tools and scanheads. These ensure safe and reliable 3D manipulation of the laser beam and high-performance materials interaction at the workpiece. Fiber Laser range includes both rack-mountable and OEM units, offering both air and water-cooled options.
Fiber amplifiers and high-power fiber lasers are topics of rapidly increasing scientific and technical interest and potential.
The combination of laseractive fibers and fiber-Bragg-gratings, structural or nonlinaer effects in fibers and/or microstructuring of the fibers yield compact and powerful modules and light sources. Their high beam quality and different functions are well suited for various applications in the micro-processing or micro-marking of many materials.
In this field of important research are the conceptual design, set-up, physical grasp and fundamental investigation of cladding pumped high-power fiber lasers or fiber amplifiers with an excellent beam quality in different pump configurations (continuously, pulsed) based on the laser-active specialty fibers developed at the department Optical Fiber Technologies with various geometries and compositions.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_laser
http://www.laser-zentrum-hannover.de/en/fields_of_work/laser_development/fiber_laser.php