All-optical gain-clamped erbium-doped fiber amplifier with improved noise figure and freedom from relaxation oscillation

Author

Ahn, Joon Tae ; Kim, Kyong Hon

Author_Institution

Basic Res. Lab., ETRI, Daejeon, South Korea

Volume

16

Issue

1

fYear

2004

Firstpage

84

Lastpage

86

Abstract

All-optical gain clamping scheme of erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) based on partial reflection of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) into the EDFA is proposed and successfully demonstrated by using a coarse wavelength division multiplexing coupler with a mirror as an ASE reflector. The proposed gain-clamped EDFA (GC-EDFA) has good gain clamping characteristics up to -12 dBm of input signal power with 1-dB gain reduction from a clamped gain of 21 dB. Thanks to noncavity structure of the proposed GC-EDFA the amplifier is free from relaxation oscillation and has 1-dB improved noise figure, compared to a previous GC-EDFA based on a ring-type optical cavity.

Keywords

erbium; laser cavity resonators; laser mirrors; optical fibre amplifiers; optical fibre couplers; superradiance; wavelength division multiplexing; 21 dB; ASE reflector; all-optical gain-clamped erbium-doped fiber amplifier; amplified spontaneous emission; coarse wavelength division multiplexing coupler; gain clamping characteristics; gain reduction; gain-clamped EDFA; mirror; noise figure; noncavity structure; partial reflection; relaxation oscillation; ring-type optical cavity; Acoustic reflection; Clamps; Erbium-doped fiber amplifier; Gain; Mirrors; Noise figure; Optical reflection; Semiconductor optical amplifiers; Spontaneous emission; Wavelength division multiplexing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Photonics Technology Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1041-1135

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LPT.2003.818906

Filename

1255959