Abstract
Few-mode erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (FM-EDFAs) are one of the most important optical subsystems for successful space division multiplexed transmission systems. In this paper, we propose a new FM-EDFA designed to achieve significantly reduced differential modal gain (DMG) via strong mode coupling. Using a new numerical model based on a fiber transfer matrix, the DMGs of FM-EDFAs are systematically investigated and two different types of six-mode fiber amplifiers are analyzed, as exemplar demonstrations. In a uniformly doped step-index fiber, the DMG can be reduced from 9.3 to 1.1 dB (i.e., 8.2 dB reduction) and further reduced to 0.5 dB in a dual-layer doping structure.
Highlights
With the increasing demand for optical fiber transmission capacity, space division multiplexing (SDM) has been explored, in depth, as an effective way to overcome the capacity limit of conventional single-mode fiber transmission systems by using spatially multiplexed channels in few-mode fibers (FMFs) and/or multi-core fibers (MCFs) [1,2,3]
Various advanced amplifier fiber designs have been investigated to minimize the differential modal gain (DMG) [5,6,7], and it has been reported that the DMGs of FM-EDFAs supporting 6, 10, and 21 spatial modes can be reduced to 2–3 dB by adopting these approaches [8,9,10]
To study the role of mode mixing in reducing the DMG in FM−EDFAs, we compa the DMG of a Type−A 6−mode EDFA with and without strong mode coupling (MC)
Summary
With the increasing demand for optical fiber transmission capacity, space division multiplexing (SDM) has been explored, in depth, as an effective way to overcome the capacity limit of conventional single-mode fiber transmission systems by using spatially multiplexed channels in few-mode fibers (FMFs) and/or multi-core fibers (MCFs) [1,2,3]. Gain Equalization for Few-Mode Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers via Strong Mode Coupling. Their matching optical fiber amplifiers are the key building blocks in long-haul SDM transmission systems, and various types of few-mode erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (FMEDFAs) [4,5,6,7,8,9,10] and multi-core EDFAs [11,12] have been developed over the past 10 years in order to simultaneously amplify all the spatial channels.
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