Fiber Laser - Advantages and Applications

Advantages and Applications

The advantages of fiber lasers over other types include:

• Light is already coupled into a flexible fiber: The fact that the light is already in a fiber allows it to be easily delivered to a movable focusing element. This is important for laser cutting, welding, and folding of metals and polymers.

• High output power: Fiber lasers can have active regions several kilometers long, and so can provide very high optical gain. They can support kilowatt levels of continuous output power because of the fiber's high surface area to volume ratio, which allows efficient cooling.

• High optical quality: The fiber's waveguiding properties reduce or eliminate thermal distortion of the optical path, typically producing a diffraction-limited, high-quality optical beam.

• Compact size: Fiber lasers are compact compared to rod or gas lasers of comparable power, because the fiber can be bent and coiled to save space.

• Reliability: Fiber lasers exhibit high vibrational stability, extended lifetime, and maintenance-free turnkey operation.

Fiber laser can also refer to the machine tool that includes the fiber resonator.

Applications of fiber lasers include material processing, telecommunications, spectroscopy, medicine, and directed energy weapons.