Self-pulsing in kilowatt level narrow-linewidth fiber amplifier with WNS phase-modulation

The self-pulsing phenomenon in kilowatt level narrow-linewidth fiber amplifiers with white noise source (WNS) phase-modulation is observed experimentally. It possesses the obvious threshold of the pump power and prevents the narrow-linewidth fiber lasers from further power scaling. The experimental study shows that known explanations are not applicable here and indicates that occurrence of self-pulsing is closely related to Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) process. The theoretical discussion reveals that the spikes in the modulated spectrum are the critical factor that SBS threshold is lower than the theoretical estimation. The 1+1 dimensional SBS model analysis predicts that self-pulsing originates from forward second order Stokes pulses, which is in good qualitative agreement with the experimental data. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America