High-power, efficient and azimuthally polarized ytterbium-doped fiber laser.

An ytterbium-doped fiber laser was demonstrated to emit azimuthally polarized light with high laser power and efficiency, in which a birefringent yttrium vanadate (YVO(4)) crystal was used as the intracavity polarization discriminator. The laser power reached 3.94 W with a slope efficiency of ∼71%. Our study proved that an efficient, high-power vector fiber laser would be realistic under the utilization of a simple and low-cost birefringent crystal as polarization discriminator.