Temporal stability of cladding pumped Yb-doped fibre lasers

Summary form only given. Over the last several years cladding pumped fibre lasers have become a basic tool in research labs, replacing conventional solid-state lasers. A well-designed fibre laser offers excellent thermal properties, reliability, simplicity and compactness. Output power from fibre lasers can reach a 100 W level. Cladding pumped lasers and amplifiers find applications not only in telecommunications as high power EDFA and Raman amplifiers but also in more traditional applications such as narrow band and single frequency pump sources for optical parametric generators and nonlinear frequency converters. In all of these areas temporal stability of the master source, which in many cases is a fibre laser, plays a fundamental role. In the paper we present results of an experimental study of temporal behavior of a cladding pumped Yb-doped fibre laser.