Development of an all-fiber spliced laser system using stimulated Brillouin scattering mitigation techniques and achieving 50 ns, 10 kW peak power for lidar applications

This work compares several Yb-doped large mode area (LMA) fiber amplifiers operating in the ∼50 ns regime at 1030 nm designed for airborne wind lidar application. The sinusoidal phase modulation applied to the signal enhances the SBS threshold by a factor 8.8 compared to a single frequency operation while still complying with lidar receiver spectral requirements. By combining this modulation with short, highly doped LMA fibers, more than 10 kW output peak power has been reached for 50 ns pulses at 40 kHz repetition rate.