High pumping-efficiency and wideband L-band erbium-doped fiber ASE source using two-stage double-pass backward pumping configuration

Abstract

We present a wideband and high pumping-efficiency L-band erbium-doped fiber (EDF) amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) source using a two-stage double pass backward (DPB) pumping configuration.DPB configuration has been proved to have a high pumping-efficiency. In this paper we use a two-stage DPB pumping configuration to generate a stable L-band ASE source for the first time. The source consists of two sections of EDF, a 1480nm pumping laser diode (LD) which is divided into two portions to pump two sections of EDF separately. By using a power splitter, the pumping power of two stages can be adjusted proportionally. The effects of EDF length and pump power arrangement on the output characteristics of L-band ASE spectrum, output power and mean wavelength are theoretically investigated. The results show that the pumping-conversion efficiency and the linewidth can be improved significantly by optimizing the fiber length ratio and pump ratio of the two-stage DPB configuration. Based on former work, the total fiber length is chosen at 19m in this paper. With the total fiber length fixed, the proposed source has a high pumping efficiency of 53%, an output power of 111mW, and a broadening linewidth of 49nm with the mean wavelength at 1580.18nm under the optimizing fiber ratio of 0.842 and pump power ratio of 0.5.