Analytical investigation of GeO2-doped optical fibers to build Brillouin lasers at 1300 nm

Abstract

The 1.5 µm spectral region concentrates the most substantial attention on building fiber laser sources for communications applications. However, data transmission in this spectral region is quite congested, requiring exploring new neighboring regions. In particular, 1.3 µm, usually defined as the zero-dispersion band, currently constitutes an active field of research, and the development of fiber laser sources in this wavelength band is of substantial interest to expand the capabilities of existing photonic operations. Previous experimental investigations have already shown that the peak stimulated Brillouin scattering efficiency is strongly affected by the concentration of GeO2 doping in single-mode fibers. In this context, this work presents an analytical investigation of the performance of a Brillouin fiber laser at 1.3 µm using optical fibers doped with different GeO2 concentrations as a Brillouin gain medium. The results obtained suggest that optical fibers doped with high GeO2 concentrations can be a simple and effective solution to build Brillouin lasers with better efficiency in the 1.3 µm band employing shorter fiber lengths with low pump power values.