An apparatus and method for transmission of
laser pulses with high output beam quality using
large core step-index silica optical fibers having thick cladding, are described. The thick cladding suppresses
diffusion of
modal power to higher order
modes at the core-cladding interface, thereby enabling higher beam quality, M2, than are observed for
large core, thin cladding optical fibers. For a given NA and core size, the thicker the cladding, the better the output beam quality.
Mode coupling coefficients, D, has been found to scale approximately as the inverse square of the cladding dimension and the inverse square root of the
wavelength. Output from a 2 m long silica
optical fiber having a 100 μm core and a 660 μm cladding was found to be close to single mode, with an M2=1.6. Another thick cladding
fiber (400 μm core and 720 μm clad) was used to transmit 1064 nm pulses of
nanosecond duration with high beam quality to form gas sparks at the focused output (focused intensity of >100 GW / cm2), wherein the energy in the core was <6 mJ, and the duration of the
laser pulses was about 6 ns. Extending the
pulse duration provided the ability to increase the delivered
pulse energy (>20 mJ delivered for 50 ns pulses) without damaging the
silica fiber.