Abstract
We present the design and characterization of a cladding-pumped amplifier with erbium doping located in an annular region near the core. This erbium-doped fiber is proposed to reduce gain saturation, leading to smaller gain compression when compared to uniform core doping. Through numerical simulations, we first compare the performance of three fibers with different erbium doping profiles in the core or the cladding. When the doped fibers are operated at the optimum length, results show that the smaller overlap of the signal mode field with the annular erbium doping region leads to higher gain and lower saturation of the amplifier. A single-core erbium-doped fiber with an annular doping and a D-shaped cladding was fabricated. Measurements demonstrate less than 4 dB of gain compression over the C-band for input power ranging from -40 dBm to 3 dBm. Small gain compression EDFAs are of interest for applications that require input channel reconfiguration. Higher gain and saturation output power are also key issues in cladding-pumped multi-core amplifiers.
Highlights
Fueled by cloud-based applications, video streaming and supercomputing, data traffic carried by communication networks has grown considerably in the last few decades
Through numerical simulations we compared various erbium doping profiles of claddingpumped single-core fiber amplifiers to maximize its minimum gain while limiting gain compression to less than 4 dB
The results show that inserting the Er+3 in an annular region of the cladding near the core leads to better performance
Summary
Fueled by cloud-based applications, video streaming and supercomputing, data traffic carried by communication networks has grown considerably in the last few decades. We consider a double-clad optical fiber with an annular erbium-doped region located in the cladding for amplification of a single mode [Fig. 1(c)] The purpose of this design is to reduce signal overlap with the doped region in order to reduce saturation and minimize gain compression [23,24], which is an important advantage for EDFAs used in dynamic and reconfigurable networks. To our knowledge this is the first direct detailed comparison of simulation and measurement of a cladding-pumped EDFA, with erbium-ion doping located in the cladding, that is designed to lower gain compression. We examine fiber designs meeting a target of
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