Gain equalizable optical parametric amplifiers using few-mode fiber

Abstract

Fiber optical parametric amplifier (FOPA), which is based on the four-wave mixing (FWM) effect in optical fibers, is an important amplifier in fiber-based communication systems. To date, FOPAs have extensively studied in variety of single mode fibers. Recently, few-mode fiber (FMF) has attracted much attention because of its potential for providing further increase in per-fiber transmission capacity via mode-division multiplexing (MDM) technology. To amplify the signal of MDM system, few-mode FOPA (FM-FOPA) with high gain and large bandwidth are required. So far, a lot of efforts have been made on proposing the structure and design of FMFs for simultaneously amplifying the telecom band signals in different spatial modes via FWM in FMFs, however, the experimental demonstration has not been carried out yet. In this work, using 90-m-long homemade few-mode dispersion-shifted fiber, we demonstrate the first experimental realization of FM-FOPA and study its gain dependence on polarization and spatial mode. The gain spectra of the intramodal FWMs in LP01 and LP11 modes are in the telecom C and S bands, respectively. When the average powers of pulsed pump in LP01 and LP11 modes are 7 mW and 10 mW, the measured gains are about 24.5 dB and 7 dB, respectively. Moreover, we show that the gain equalized amplification can be realized for 1535 nm seed injection in LP01 and LP11 mode, respectively. Our investigation has potential application in developing low noise amplifier for MDM communication systems.