Direct Emission Yellow Fibre Lasers

This project, led by the University of Auckland (UoA), seeks to address the absence of practical fibre lasers with direct emission in the yellow wavelength range. Such laser sources would have several important applications in, e.g., medicine, ophthalmology, skin treatments, and astronomical imaging. Unfortunately, experimental realizations of cost effective, intense, and stable yellow laser sources have remained elusive. While recent advances in soft-glass fibres have opened new active fibre pathways to direct yellow lasing, current reports for phosphate fibre lasers emitting in the visible (~575 nm) are limited to low-power continuous wave demonstrations. This project brings together a team of researchers from UoA, the University of Otago, and the University of Sydney (Australia) that aims to demonstrate stable mode-locked operation and direct amplification of coherent yellow light. It has natural connections with the ``Rare-earth ions in low-symmetry sites for quantum information'' project O6, which requires visible lasers to convert photons from microwave to optical frequencies.