Graphene-based side-polished optical fiber amplifier.

Abstract

We demonstrate a novel design for optical fiber amplifiers, utilizing side-polished fibers with a single-layer graphene overlay as the active medium and carrier injection in the graphene layer to provide the required inversion. We study the effects of an electrically induced graphene p-i-n heterojunction in the forward bias regime on optical modes of side-polished fibers and show that gain values of 0.51, 1.81, and 1.79 dB/cm for wavelengths 1064, 1330, and 1550 nm can be obtained for single-mode side-polished fibers. Our results show that in multi-mode side-polished fibers, higher order modes experience higher values of gain, and gain can be increased by increasing polished depth. The proposed system is a tunable wideband optical amplifier that can operate for wavelengths larger than 1000 nm.