High efficiency cascaded Raman fiber laser with output power of 204W at 1480 nm

We demonstrate a 1480 nm cascaded Raman fiber laser with a new high efficiency architecture providing a record output power of 204 W. We achieve this through multiple Raman shifts of a high power 1117nm Yb-doped fiber laser in a single pass configuration mediated at all intermediate wavelengths using a seed source comprising a low power conventional 1480nm Raman laser. The conversion efficiency from 1117nm to 1480nm is ~65% (for a quantum limited efficiency of 75%). Enhancement in efficiency is achieved by elimination of excess optical loss present in the conventional cascaded Raman resonator based architecture.