A cladding-pumped fiber laser with pump-reflecting inner-cladding Bragg grating

A fiber Bragg grating (FBG) was inscribed in the inner cladding of a double-clad fiber, in order to reflect, and thus, double-pass, the pump radiation in a cladding-pumped fiber laser. The effective pump reflectivity of the inner-cladding FBG was ∼46.4%. This increased the slope efficiency of a Yb-doped cladding-pumped fiber laser by up to 8.5%, and the output power increased by 45% with a 3-W pump source. The FBG provides stable and robust pump reflection, while leaving the fiber end free, for example, so that a signal transmission fiber can be spliced to the double-clad fiber.