Raman fiber lasing is an efficient approach for the generation of high power MIR fiber lasers. Currently, by using tellurite, fluoride or chalcogenide glass fibers as the Raman gain media, the 3.77 μm second order cascaded Raman fiber laser and 24.3 μm tunable Raman soliton fiber laser have been developed. However, limited by the characteristics of infrared glass and high quality fiber & device fabrication technologies, the research on MIR Raman fiber lasers is still in the development stage, and the output power is quite low in the order of watts. Very recently, the authors have developed fluorotellurite glass fibers with good stabilities and high laser damage thresholds, and preliminarily verified their potential for constructing high power MIR Raman fiber lasers. We believe that tunable MIR Raman soliton lasers covering the whole 25 μm region could be obtained by optimizing the parameters of fluorotellurite glass fibers and pump lasers, and hundred-watt-level high power MIR Raman fiber lasers would be achieved by improving the quality of fluorotellurite fibers and with the development of high quality MIR fiber devices (e.g. fiber gratings) in the future.
Zhixu Jia, Xiaohui Guo, Yadong Jia, Weiping Qin, Guanshi Qin. Progress on Mid-Infrared Raman Lasers Based on Special Glass Fibers[J]. Chinese Journal of Lasers, 2022, 49(1): 0101004