Brightness enhancement and beam profiles in an LD-pumped graded-index fiber Raman laser

We demonstrate an efficient conversion of highly-multimode (M²∼34) pump beam from fiber-combined 938-nm laser diodes into a 976-nm Stokes beam of high quality (M²=1.7-2 at output powers 10-52 W) that results in record brightness enhancement (BE=73) for Raman lasers based on graded-index fiber (GIF) and other fibers. The measured shapes of the output beams in GIF show that the near-parabolic pump beam becomes depleted above the Raman threshold so that the hole in the pump beam profile is much broader than the generated Stokes beam of near-Gaussian shape. The effect is analyzed in frames of a radially-dependent balance model with an account for the mode-selective feedback by FBG, which qualitatively describes the high-quality Stokes beam generation and the hole formation, but the hole width (and its power broadening) as well as the BE values are not consistent with experiment. Possible reasons for the difference are discussed.