Corning Launches Double Clad Specialty Fiber; Industry leading all-glass composition for high power fiber lasers

This newest addition to Corning's broad specialty fiber portfolio captures emerging technology trends in the growing fiber laser market and is targeted for defense, commercial materials processing, marking lasers and other high power laser applications. This development was supported in part by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the High Power Fiber Lasers Program.


Corning's ytterbium-doped fibers are manufactured by a proprietary Outside Vapor Deposition (OVD) process using an all-glass cladding composition that provides superior consistency and the industry's lowest passive loss in the core and inner clad regions. Available in single-mode, multimode and large-mode-area (LMA) profiles, Corning's double clad fibers achieve 78% slope efficiencies.

"Our all-glass cladding provides a significant performance advantage versus today's polymer claddings" explained Corning Specialty Fiber Product Manager, Siska Boddez. "Polymers tend to degrade over time, while Corning's glass composition is a power-scalable fiber design optimized for long term reliability. In addition to double clad fiber, Corning has single polarization fibers in the pipeline that will enable next generation high power fiber lasers, fiber optic gyroscopes and new telecom applications where one seeks to avoid polarization instabilities."

Ytterbium double clad fiber is part of Corning's broad and growing specialty fiber portfolio, which includes polarization maintaining, high index, erbium, and reduced clad fibers for telecommunications and non-telecommunications markets.