Yb-doped large mode area fibers with depressed clad and dopant confinement

Large mode area fibers with depressed-index cladding layer and confinement of rare-earth dopants can provide effective suppression of high-order modes. A polarization-maintaining Yb-doped double-clad fiber with 35/250 mu m core/clad diameter has been fabricated from conventional methods according to this design. The fiber which has an effective mode area close to 500 mu m(2) yields near diffraction-limited output with beam quality factor M-2 close to 1.1 when tested as a power amplifier with a coherent seed light source. Beam pointing measurements provide further evidence for near single-mode behavior as the pointing fluctuations are shown to be negligible once the fiber is coiled to a given diameter.