Review of High-Power Continuous Wave Yb-Doped Fiber Lasers near 980 nm

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript by Zhou et al. reviews the current state of the art of the Yb-doped fiber lasers near 980 nm. The authors provide sufficient motivation for this topic --- its ample applications in both pumping other lasers and generation of higher photon energies through frequency harmonics. The authors then discuss the main obstacle --- how to suppress the competing amplified spontaneous emission near 1030 nm, and provide a simple criterion to address this issue --- one needs a larger core-to-cladding area ratio.

In the main section of the review, the authors comprehensively survey previous works regarding upscaling the laser power under two competing constraints --- maintaining a high beam quality or a high pump efficiency. The authors also discussed works related to micro-structured fiber lasers, as well as the new challenges that emerged with the higher power 980 nm lasers.

This review is clearly written and follows a good logic flow. It provides quantitative information on the development of Yb-doped fiber lasers, so I find it very informational. Therefore, I recommend publication of this paper.

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscripts. We have carefully read your comments and thanks again for your approval of our manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, the works in the field of high-power CW Yb-doped fiber lasers near 980 nm were reviewed. The motivation and interesting to such fiber laser sources are justified. The main challenges in their development are mentioned. The applications of 980 nm -lasers are briefly discussed. I believe that the paper may be useful for readers. However, I have a couple of certain comments to the authors listed below.

 1. In the introduction (lines 31-34) it is written:
“Nowadays, various rear-earth-doped fibers are presented and studied to increasing the wave-length diversity, e.g., Er-doped [10], Yb-doped [11], Nd-doped [12], Tm-doped [13], and Ho-doped [14] fibers, which extends the wavelength from infrared to mid-infrared region.”
Papers [10-14] were published more than 30 years ago. I suggest also to cite more recent articles, preferably review ones, from which readers can learn up-to-date information about the state of the art.

2. The review is presented as a collection of results. In each section, the listing of works with brief description is given. To my opinion, It would be useful to summarize results in a table indicating the main parameters, the year of demonstration, etc. This will simplify the perception of information and make it easy to compare different achievements.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf