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Fiber lasers

Solid-state lasers or laser amplifiers where the light is guided due to the total internal reflection in a single mode optical fiber are instead called fiber lasers. Guiding of light allows extremely long gain regions providing good cooling conditions; fibers have a high surface area to volume ratio which allows efficient cooling. In addition, the fiber's waveguiding properties tend to reduce the thermal distortion of the beam. Erbium and ytterbium ions are common active species in such lasers.

Quite often, the fiber laser is designed as a double-clad fiber. This type of fiber consists of a fiber core, an inner cladding, and an outer cladding. The index of the three concentric layers is chosen so that the fiber core acts as a single-mode fiber for the laser emission while the outer cladding acts as a highly multimode core for the pump laser. This lets the pump propagate a large amount of power into and through the active inner core region, while still having a high numerical aperture (NA) to have easy launching conditions.

Pump light can be used more efficiently by creating a fiber disk laser, or a stack of such lasers.

Fiber lasers, like other optical media, can suffer from the effects of photodarkening when they are exposed to radiation of certain wavelengths. In particular, this can lead to degradation of the material and loss in laser functionality over time. The exact causes and effects of this phenomenon vary from material to material, although it often involves the formation of color centers.