Double-pass erbium-doped zirconia fiber amplifier for wide-band and flat-gain operations

✍ Scribed by S.W. Harun; M.C. Paul; N.A.D. Huri; A. Hamzah; S. Das; M. Pal; S.K. Bhadra; H. Ahmad; S. Yoo; M.P. Kalita; A.J. Boyland; J.K. Sahu

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 365 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0030-3992
• DOI: 10.1016/j.optlastec.2011.03.023

✦ Synopsis

The double-pass erbium-doped zirconia fiber amplifier (EDZFA) is proposed and demonstrated to provide a wide-band amplification as well as flat-gain operation in both the C-and L-band regions using only a single-gain medium. The proposed amplifier utilizes an erbium-doped zirconia fiber (EDZF) with erbium ion concentration of 2800 ppm as a gain medium. The medium is fabricated in a ternary glass host, zirconia-yttria-aluminum codoped silica fiber through solution doping technique along with modified chemical vapor deposition (MCVD). Compared to a single-pass operation, the doublepass EDZFA shows a better gain performance. At input signal power of 0 dBm and the optimum EDZF length of 2 m, a flat gain of around 16 dB is achieved by the proposed double-pass amplifier with gain variation of approximately 2.5 dB throughout the wavelength range from 1530 to 1590 nm. However, the noise figure of the double-pass amplifier is slightly higher than that of the single-pass due to inefficient population inversion at the input part of the amplifier.