Maintaining chromatic dispersion and signal gain performances in a chalcogenide buffer step-index optical fiber.

Abstract

Aiming at maintaining the chromatic dispersion properties and fiber optical parametric amplification (FOPA) performance when fiber core fluctuation occurs, we propose a buffer step-index optical fiber. The AsSe2 chalcogenide glass is employed as the core material due to its high nonlinearity and broad transmission spectrum. The calculated results in this study show that the chromatic dispersion variation due to the change of core diameter can be greatly suppressed and a continuous and very broad FOPA signal gain spectrum can be obtained and maintained by carefully controlling the core, buffer and cladding properties such as refractive index and diameters. The calculated results in this study showed that by using the proposed 3-cm-long fiber pumped at 5.02 µm, a broad signal gain bandwidth from 3 to 14 µm at about 15 dB is attainable although the fiber core diameter Dc drastically fluctuated from 2 to 5 µm and the buffer diameter Db varies from 8.9 to 9.3 µm. Moreover, when Dc varies in smaller range from 3 to 4 µm, the FOPA signal gain spectra calculated at different fixed values of Db in the range from 8.9 to 9.3 µm are highly maintained. When Db is kept at 9.0 µm and Dc varies from 3 to 4 µm, the calculated FOPA signal gain spectra at different pump wavelengths from 4.98 to 5.02 µm are also nearly identical in the wavelength range from 3 up to 13 µm.