Optical Engines, Inc. — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: S11

Description

To meet the NASA need, Optical Engines (OEI) proposes to develop a new HE-ULMA, that will deliver high energy pulses with near diffraction limited beam quality from a single gain fiber. It is based on the technological concept of OEI commercial products and will also employ our understanding of advanced glass processing to create fiber lasers and amplifiers with distributed signal mode filtering with efficient pump power passing.The proposed development of HE-ULMA will leverage of OEIrsquo;s experience in world class fiber glass processing to create novel fiber laser structures to enable single mode near diffraction limited operation of Ultra Large Mode Area (ULMA) fiber lasers with multi mj pulse pulse storage and pulse output capabilities,nbsp; Achieving this high energy performance will allow NASA to create remote sensing systems with more efficient Non Linear conversions to address more essential remote sensing wavelength bands and to sense a much larger distances and sensitivities.In Phase 1 OEI will perform critical modelling, simulations and experiments to determine the fiber device requirements and amplifier design architectures for making a typically multimode, commercially 100/400um Yb doped gain fiber operate in a single mode diffraction limited operation.nbsp; In addition OEI, will develop double fiber mode filters (DFMF) that will allow only the fundamental LP01 mode to propagate while allowing the pump light to pass effiently through the DFMF.At the end of Phase II, a TRL 4 level pulsed fiber laser will be demonstrated with 7-10m of single mode 100/400um gain fiber (over 300mj of energy storage) in a high average power counter pumped configuration.nbsp; This laser will be operated both in high extraction energy (pulse widths of ~100ns) and in high peak power (pulse width of less than 2ns) regimes.nbsp; This laser will be delivered to the indicated NASA facility for additional testing.nbsp;