Origin of SRS-induced beam quality distortion under TMI threshold.

In high power fiber lasers, the degradation of beam quality caused by Raman effect has attracted more and more attention in recent years, but its physical mechanism is still unclear. We're going to differentiate between heat effect and nonlinear effect by duty cycle operation. The evolution of beam quality at different pump duty cycles has been studied based on a quasi-continuous wave (QCW) fiber laser. It is found that even if the Stokes intensity is only -6 dB (energy proportion: 26%) lower than that of the signal light intensity, the beam quality has no obvious change with the duty cycle of 5%; on the contrary, when the duty cycle gradually approaches 100% (CW-pumped scheme), the beam quality distortion changes faster and faster with the increase of Stokes intensity. The experimental results are contrary to core-pumped Raman effect theory [IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett.34, 215 (2022)10.1109/LPT.2022.3148999], and further analysis confirms that the heat accumulation in the process of Stokes frequency shift should be responsible for this phenomenon. That is the first time, to the best of our knowledge, for intuitive reveal of the origin of stimulated Raman scattering (SRS)-induced beam quality distortion under transverse mode instability (TMI) threshold in an experiment.