Phenomena of gain saturation in semiconductor laser amplifiers

The gain saturation induced nonlinearities lead to distortion of the input optical pulses in the form of pulse compression or pulse broadening because the leading edge saturates the amplifier and the trailing edge suffers a gain reduction due to the saturation of the amplifier. The level of input power which causes the gain saturation is very important since it defines the intended application of a SLA. In this paper, a new analytical method to estimate the level of input optical power which causes the gain saturation in different types of SLA is outlined. Also, this technique is successfully applied to calculate the gain of FP and near traveling wave (TW) SLA