Experimental study on the impact of signal bandwidth on the transverse mode instability threshold of fiber amplifiers.

In this work, we conduct a detailed experimental study on the impact of signal bandwidth on the TMI threshold of fiber amplifiers. Both the filtered superfluorescent fiber sources and the phase-modulated single-frequency lasers are employed to construct seed lasers with different 3 dB spectral linewidths ranging from 0.19 nm to 7.97 nm. The TMI threshold of the fiber amplifier employing those seed lasers are estimated through the intensity evolution of the signal laser, and different criteria have been utilized to characterize the spectral linewidth of the seed lasers. Notably, the experimental results reveal that the TMI threshold of fiber amplifiers grows, keeps constant, and further grows as a function of spectral linewidth of seed lasers. Our experimental results could provide a well reference to understand the mechanism of the TMI effect and optimize the TMI effect in high-power fiber amplifiers.