Architectures and components for high power CW fiber lasers

High power fiber lasers are gaining increasing shares in the laser material process- ing market due to their many advantages over gas and solid-state lasers. The design approaches for the typical architectures used in continuous emission fiber lasers are revised and the impact of the different choices on the specifications of the cavity com- ponents are analyzed. Then, some results on the fabrication of key components for an all-fiber setup, such as pump (PCs) and signal combiners (SCs), are reported. Finally, an example of a high power module, suitable for the development of an over 4 kW system is presented.