Special erbium fiber amplifiers for short pulse switching, lasers, and propagation

We show that specially tailored erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA´s) can be useful for short-pulse soliton lasers, switching, and propagation. EDFA properties include group-velocity dispersion, birefringence, doping level, and doping distribution; and changing each of these properties enables novel applications. Polarization-maintaining EDFA´s can Re used in erbium-doped fiber lasers to avoid intensity-dependent or temperature-dependent state of polarization. We have demonstrated a passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser that generates nearly transform-limited 320 fs pulses with 40 pJ energy using a polarization-maintaining EDFA near the zero dispersion wavelength and a bulk InGaAsP saturable absorber. Moderately birefringent EDFA´s can be used to control the walkoff and interaction between orthogonally polarized solitons in all-optical switches. For example, through numerical simulations, we design an all-optical cascadable logic gate with a fanout of 2.7 and energy contrast of 5.5 based on interactions in a soliton period long EDFA. Furthermore, distributed EDFA´s can be used for long-distance soliton propagation to shepherd the pulse using bandwidth-limited gain. For picosecond soliton pulses, we show that soliton self-frequency shift and Gordon-Hans effects limit propagation to below 100 km even for low-dispersion fibers. Bandwidth-limited amplification in EDFA may counteract frequency shift due to the soliton self-frequency shift, while frequency filters may suppress the Gordon-Hans effect. Also, because the gain spectral profile for the three-level EDFA changes with pump intensity, complications arise from pump attenuation, and the corresponding changes in the gain spectral profile along the length of the fiber