Date: Thursday, April 3, 2025

Time: 12:45 PM to 1:45 PM

Location:  PAIS, Room 2540 and Zoom

Speaker: Dr. Jeff Nicholson, OSE Alumnus, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff and Senior Engineering Manager
OFS Fitel, LLC

Abstract:

High-power fiber lasers are used in diverse areas such as industrial machining and welding, advanced LIDAR, free-space optical communications and Directed Energy weapon systems. Fabricating fibers for use in such applications require consideration of aspects such as material composition, and waveguide and cladding design. These design considerations impact optical properties such as modal content, dispersion, nonlinearity, gain and loss, and ultimately determine achievable performance from a fiber laser.  This talk will give an overview of specialty fibers for fiber lasers and present some recent specialty optical fiber  designs for lasers at OFS that enable significant performance increases.

Biography:

Dr. Nicholson received his PhD in Optical Sciences from the University of New Mexico in 1997.  After graduation, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Labs studying filamentation of ultrashort pulses in the atmosphere, and then joined Directed Energy Solutions in Albuquerque, NM, developing optically pumped molecular lasers.  In 2001, he joined the Optical Fiber Research Group of Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, in Murray Hill, NJ, which was later sold to Furukawa Electric and became OFS.  He is currently a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in OFS Labs and Senior Engineering Manager, leading the team of scientists and engineers researching and developing high-power fiber lasers at OFS. In 2017, Dr. Nicholson was named an Optica Fellow.