The effect of 980 nm and 1480 nm pumping on the performance of newly Hafnium Bismuth Erbium-doped fiber amplifier

Abstract

An experimental study on the comparison of optical amplifying performance between 980 nm and 1480 nm pumping for the newly Hafnium Bismuth Erbium co-doped fiber (HB-EDF) has been presented. A short length of 1-meter HB-EDF was used as the gain medium of the optical amplifier. 1480 nm pumping is found to provide higher attainable gain and lower noise figure compared to 980 nm pumping. At 1480 nm pumping, the average small signal gain for HB-EDFA in the single pass configuration has improved by 13.4 dB in the C-band region range from 1525 nm to 1565 nm. In the double-pass configuration, a maximum small signal gain of 36.6 dB was achieved at the wavelength of 1560 nm, this is 11.6 dB higher compared to the HB-EDFA with 980 nm pumping. The double pass HB-EDFA with 1480 nm pumping has exhibited a reduction of average noise figure by 23.4% and 29.8% for -30 dBm and -10 dBm of input signal power respectively in the C- and L-band region.