Someone tried telecom optic fiber laser diodes?

[rafalrrrr]

Hey!

I'm really curious how the power output can be achieved with cheap SFP modules or more integrated fiber optic switches, can it go over 1W of laser light? Maybe more advanced ones will output red, green or blue/violet light instead of IR?

 

[RedCowboy]

I haven't yet but they look like VCSEL of 850nm to 1550nm with total power consumption of 1W or less, they appear to be inexpensive on the 2nd hand market.

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[rafalrrrr]

Maybe it is possible to get from them at least 100mW of pure IR power, but everywhere is written, this product is Class 1 laser product

 

[RedCowboy]

Pretty neat little bits of kit, they seem to be rated in meters of range over fiber optic cable....... so far I haven't seen any over 1w of power consumption, I suspect light output would be much less. What purpose do you have in mind ? Night vision related ?

If you're interested in night vision illumination there's tons of led emitters and flashlights. The 1st one is VCSEL the 2nd LED

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[rafalrrrr]

No, rather pure curiosity But some fancy models with tens of kilometrs of range should have powerful emitter what is good for making laser etching device, just combine them using some PBS cubes designed for IR and in result u will have competition to the CO2 laser tube High efficiency, low cost, compact size

 

[RedCowboy]

You can only PBS combine two beams or knife edged beam bundles one horizontally polarized and the other vertically polarized, then there's the alignment, all the mirrors have to be AR coated and kept super clean, any dust/contaminants that you can't even see will rob power and the alignment as well as all the fixtures add up in time and expense ...... it's a learning experience.

Maybe you could use one as a seed laser and amplify it somehow, like in a double clad doped fiber pumped by many knife edged arrays of cheap multi mode power..... like an active fiber laser lol.

It's fun to combine visible lasers of the same wavelength or RGB, but near IR.... why ?
If you want an industrial laser save your pennies and buy one and if you want to learn to combine beams, start with beams that you can see.

 

[atomd]

Telecom communication modules rarely exit 200mW range, because that's maximum that can be made in single mode and you can't effectively couple multimode diode to single mode fiber. Also you'll find most of them in 13xx or 1550nm range, older ones in 850nm as this are 2nd, 3rd and 1st communication windows respectively. Parts of spectrum that minimize loses.

That being said you can combine power from multiple laser diodes using fiber coupler quite effectvely, still I'm not sure if combining 200mW sources + hacking SFPs for constant output beam is something work work.

 

[RedCowboy]

As I understand it, there's a limit as to how many single mode beams you can combine using fused couplers based on the fiber diameter while maintaining high beam quality.

But a great many multi mode pump arrays can be and are combined with much larger fiber and used to pump doped double clad fiber with the inner fiber being the gain medium that a high quality seed laser beam is amplified through.

So when you see a board covered with the little arrays all fiber coupled, those are multi mode arrays which don't have the coherence length we want, like we get from a co2 laser or a double clad active fiber laser.