This work demonstrates the generation of short pulse duration and high-beam-quality laser pulses using transient stimulated Brillouin scattering at a high repetition rate. Thermal effects and optical breakdown are identified as the main factors that restrict energy reflectivity and beam quality under high repetition rates and transient situations. Through experimental analysis, the interaction length and focal point size are determined to be the key parameters in reducing the thermal effect by reducing the absorption of the laser pulse by the medium. The obtained results show that pulses with a duration of 175 ps and beam quality M2 of around 1.2 can be achieved with a maximum energy reflectivity of over 40% under an interaction length of 50 mm. Furthermore, at an interaction length of 90 mm, a pulse output with a minimum duration of 115 ps (0.5τQ) is achieved.

A continuous-wave (CW) single-longitudinal-mode (SLM) Raman laser at 1240 nm with power of up to 20.6 W was demonstrated in a free-running diamond Raman oscillator without any axial-mode selection elements. The SLM operation was achieved due to the spatial-hole-burning free nature of Raman gain and was maintained at the highest available pump power by suppressing the parasitic stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). A folded-cavity design was employed for reducing the perturbing effect of resonances at the pump frequency. At a pump power of 69 W, the maximum Stokes output reached 20.6 W, corresponding to a 30% optical-to-optical conversion efficiency from 1064 to 1240 nm. The result shows that parasitic SBS is the main physical process disturbing the SLM operation of Raman oscillator at higher power. In addition, for the first time, the spectral linewidth of a CW SLM diamond Raman laser was resolved using the long-delayed self-heterodyne interferometric method, which is 105 kHz at 20 W.

This study analyzes the linewidth narrowing characteristics of free-space-running Brillouin lasers and investigates the approaches to achieve linewidth compression and power enhancement simultaneously. The results show that the Stokes linewidth behavior in a free-space-running Brillouin laser cavity is determined by the phase diffusion of the pump and the technical noise of the system. Experimentally, a Stokes light output with a power of 22.5 W and a linewidth of 3.2 kHz was obtained at a coupling mirror reflectivity of 96%, which is nearly 2.5 times compressed compared with the linewidth of the pump (7.36 kHz). In addition, the theorical analysis shows that at a pump power of 60 W and a coupling mirror reflectivity of 96%, a Stokes output with a linewidth of 1.6 kHz and up to 80% optical conversion efficiency can be achieved by reducing the insertion loss of the intracavity. This study provides a promising technical route to achieve high-power ultra-narrow linewidth special wavelength laser radiations.

The phase summation effect in sum-frequency mixing process is utilized to avoid a nonlinearity obstacle in the power scaling of single-frequency visible or ultraviolet lasers. Two single-frequency fundamental lasers are spectrally broadened by phase modulation to suppress stimulated Brillouin scattering in fiber amplifier and achieve higher power. After sum-frequency mixing in a nonlinear optical crystal, the upconverted laser returns to single frequency due to phase summation, when the phase modulations on two fundamental lasers have a similar amplitude but opposite sign. The method was experimentally proved in a Raman fiber amplifier-based laser system, which generated a power-scalable sideband-free single-frequency 590 nm laser. The proposal manifests the importance of phase operation in wave-mixing processes for precision laser technology.

The implementation of advanced multi-level modulation schemes such as quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) in contrast to the conventional on–off keying is crucial to further boost the terahertz (THz) communications speed. Thereby, carrier phase noise reduction in the THz range is one of the key goals that need to be urgently achieved. In this paper, the photonic-based THz sources and the phase noise problem are briefly summarized. Then, a low phase-noise photonic source based on the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) optical fiber cavity is first applied for a 300-GHz-band QPSK wireless communication link. The highest data rate at forward-error-correction limited condition was 15 Gbaud utilizing the SBS-based photonic source with a small transmit power of ~ −36 dBm. Its transmission characteristics are evaluated and compared with the conventional optical frequency comb generator (OFCG)-based source at 5 Gbaud. The proposed SBS-based photonic source has been proven to offer better performances than the OFCG-based source with respect to the phase noise, optical carrier to noise ratio, and bit error rate in communications.

The strong-coupling mode, called the “quasimode”, is excited by stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in high-intensity laser–plasma interactions. Also SBS of the quasimode competes with SBS of the fast mode (or slow mode) in multi-ion species plasmas, thus leading to a low-frequency burst behavior of SBS reflectivity. Competition between the quasimode and the ion-acoustic wave (IAW) is an important saturation mechanism of SBS in high-intensity laser–plasma interactions. These results give a clear explanation of the low-frequency periodic burst behavior of SBS and should be considered as a saturation mechanism of SBS in high-intensity laser–plasma interactions.

Laser pulses of 200 ps with extremely high intensities and high energies are sufficient to satisfy the demand of shock ignition, which is an alternative path to ignition in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). This paper reports a type of Brillouin scheme to obtain high-intensity 200-ps laser pulses, where the pulse durations are a challenge for conventional pulsed laser amplification systems. In the amplification process, excited Brillouin acoustic waves fulfill the nonlinear optical effect through which the high energy of a long pump pulse is entirely transferred to a 200-ps laser pulse. This method was introduced and achieved within the SG-III prototype system in China. Compared favorably with the intensity of $2~\text{GW}/\text{cm}^{2}$ in existing ICF laser drivers, a 6.96-$\text{GW}/\text{cm}^{2}$ pulse with a width of 170 ps was obtained in our experiment. The practical scalability of the results to larger ICF laser drivers is discussed.

In this paper, the dependence of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) threshold on the sinusoidal modulated properties of pump pulse is studied. A 527-nm-wavelength, 5 ns square laser pulse with sinusoidal temporal modulation is used as the pump source, and a 600 mm liquid heavy fluorocarbon material FC-40 is used as the Brillouin medium. The numerically calculated results indicate that the SBS threshold increases with the increase of both temporal intensity modulation index and modulation frequency of the pump pulse. However, when the intensity distortion criterion is below 30% or the duration of modulation peaks below three times the phonon lifetime, the SBS threshold tends to remain stable. The numerical results provide assistance to judge the SBS threshold for unsmoothed pump pulses, especially for high power laser applications.

High-peak-power transform-limited narrow-linewidth nanosecond all-fiber lasers are desired in a range of applications. However, their linewidths will be broadened by self-phase modulation (SPM). We propose a novel concept that generates transform-limited laser pulses by temporally shaping the pulse seed. The impact of the pulse shape on SPM-induced spectral broadening was studied numerically and experimentally. It was found theoretically that the square-shape pulsed laser is immune to SPM-induced spectral broadening. Based on this principle, we built a high-peak-power, linearly polarized, square-shape nanosecond all-fiber laser in a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) configuration. Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) limited peak powers of 4.02 kW, 5.06 kW, 6.52 kW and 9.30 kW were obtained at pulse widths of 8 ns, 7 ns, 6 ns and 5 ns. Thanks to the square-shape pulsed seed, the linewidths at maximum peak power remained at 129.5 MHz, 137.6 MHz, 156.2 MHz and 200.1 MHz, respectively, close to the transform-limited values of 110.8 MHz, 126.6 MHz, 147.7 MHz and 177.3 MHz.

An all-fiberized high-average-power narrow linewidth ns pulsed laser with linear polarization is demonstrated. The laser system utilizes a typical master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) configuration. The stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is effectively suppressed due to the short fiber length and large mode area in the main amplifier, combined with the narrow pulse duration smaller than the phonon lifetime of SBS effect. A maximal output power of 466 W is obtained with a narrow linewidth of ${\sim}$203.6 MHz, and the corresponding slope efficiency is ${\sim}$80.3%. The pulse duration is condensed to be ${\sim}$4 ns after the amplification, corresponding to the peak power of 8.8 kW and the pulse energy of $46.6~\unicode[STIX]{x03BC}\text{J}$. Near-diffraction-limited beam quality with an $M^{2}$ factor of 1.32 is obtained at the output power of 442 W and the mode instability (MI) is observed at the maximal output power. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest average output power of the all-fiberized narrow linewidth ns pulsed fiber laser with linear polarization and high beam quality, which is a promising source for the nonlinear frequency conversion, laser lidar, and so on.

This paper presents a model to study the two prominent coexisting instabilities, stimulated Raman (SRS), and stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in the presence of background axial magnetic field. In the context of laser-produced plasmas, this model is very useful in the situations where a self-generated axial magnetic field is present as well as where an external axial magnetic field is applied. Due to the interplay between both the scattering processes, the behavior of one scattering process is greatly modified in the presence of another coexisting scattering process. The impact of this coexisting phenomenon and axial magnetic field on the back reflectivity of scattered beams has been explored. It has been demonstrated that the back reflectivity gets modified significantly due to the coexistence of both the scattering processes (SRS and SBS) as well as due to the axial magnetic field. Results are also compared with the three-wave interaction case (isolated SRS or SBS case).

We report that the tail modulation of Stokes pulses in the high-energy stimulated Brillouin scattering pulse compression can be suppressed by controlling effective pulse width of the pump. It is shown through numerical simulations and validated experimentally that the effective pulse width is an appropriate parameter, which determines the generation of tail modulation. The effective pulse width broaden as the increase of energy. This mechanism leads to the amplification of Stokes tail edge and it is the cause of tail modulation.

We obtained the output of single frequency laser pulses with an average pulse-width of 136 ps and the minimum of 123 ps based on stimulated Brillouin scattering pulse compression pumped by an 8 ns-pulse-width, 1064 nm-wavelength Q-switched Nd:YAG laser. The pulse-width stability of the output is about 4.1% while that of the pump pulses is about 1.1%, the highest energy conversion efficiency is about 85%, and the single pulse energy is above 300 mJ.

This paper presents a model to study the stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) and stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) simultaneously at relativistic laser power. At high intensity, the relativistic mass correction for the plasma electrons becomes significant and the plasma refractive index gets modified which leads to the relativistic self-focusing of the pump beam. This filamentation process affects the scattering processes (SRS and SBS) and at the same time the pump filamentation process also gets modified in the presence of the coexisting SRS and SBS due to the pump depletion. We have also demonstrated that the pump depletion and relativistic filamentation affects the back-reflectivity of scattered beams (SRS and SBS) significantly, for the coexistence case.

A novel approach of beam cleanup based on stimulated Brillouin scattering with a large core fiber is proposed to improve the laser beam quality. The fusion splice scheme from a single-mode fiber to a very large core fiber (105 µm) is first employed in stimulated Brillouin scattering to steadily excite the fundamental mode of the Stokes beam. As a result, the output beam achieves a measured M2 value of around 1.3 meanwhile the pump conversion efficiency is up to 90%, which is the best in the reports of stimulated Brillouin scattering cleanup to our knowledge.

Hundred picoseconds laser pulse with high energy and high peak power has broad application prospects such as inertial confinement fusion shock ignition. But it is hard to get effective amplification through MOPA or chirped pulse amplification method. Through simulated Brillouin scattering method, 100 picoseconds laser pulse can be amplified efficiently. To be able to meet the need of high energy and high-intensity laser pulse amplification, scalable two cell structure and four different FC series liquid were used to fulfill this experiment. The results indicate that the magnification of Stokes energy and efficiency of energy extraction are closely related to medium parameters and energy parameters. The minimum width of 340 ps Stokes pulse was amplified by 13.5 times in this experiment.

This paper presents an investigation for excitation of ion acoustic wave and resulting stimulated Brillouin scattering in a collisionless plasma due to presence of a laser beam carrying null intensity at center (hollow Gaussian beam). In presence of ponderomotive nonlinearity, the pump beam get focused and affects the back stimulated Brillouin scattering process. To understand the nature of laser plasma coupling, a paraxial-ray approximation has been invoked for the propagation of the hollow Gaussian beam, ion acoustic wave, and stimulated Brillouin scattering. It is observed from the result that self-focusing and back reflectivity reduces for higher order of hollow Gaussian beam.