All solid photonic bandgap fibers for high-power fiber lasers

Fiber lasers have been increasingly playing a significant role in marking, cutting, welding, and other material processing industrial applications. Further power scaling of fiber lasers needs to overcome transverse mode instability and a range of nonlinear effects. Further improvements in effective mode area scaling and higher-order-mode suppression are essential. All-solid photonic bandgap fiber provides a potentially powerful solution due to its strong higher-order-mode suppression in large cores. In this talk, we will review our work in this area.