Hi Everyone,
Decided to turn this into a thread so whatever information is linked/shared/etc that others can benefit too.
Long story short: I never delved too deep into shooting lasers over fiber as I never had a real need so there was no incentive to learn. I have only 1 laser with an SMA fiber attachment (a cheap necsel I got over a year ago) but no fiber or anything. Seeing even some dpss builds using a fiber to combine a lot of IR laser sources and more eventually caught my interest and due to covid time is more abudant.. so time to learn I'd say.
So here are some of my questions:
- What is a good way of learning to launch a laser over fiber? Is there an affordable (used?) set that is being sold to launch a laser over a fiber? I assume parts needed are: A coupler with a focus to narrow the beam to the fiber, the fiber and a coupler to focus back onto the fiber to get the beam back?
- Other then the losses caused by diffraction what is the disadvantage of fiber launching a laser diode?
- When is a multimode fiber used other then a single mode fiber for launching lasers? (or is it always single mode?)
- How do you determine the width of the fiber? I assume you would want the smallest possible to get the most narrow ending beam?
- I see some ir diode blocks sometimes using a fiber to pull multiple sources closer together to provide a strong pump source for laser.. can I just focus in multiple lasers coming in from different angles at a narrow fiber to bring beams really close? can this process be done for multiple wavelengths at once into one fiber even when they come in at other angles??
To me this was a good indicator of what components are used to do the job: https://www.dragonlasers.com/xc_old/...ment_Guide.pdf