Abstract
To predict the noise performance or a system with optical amplifiers, one must predict the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) it generates. This is conventionally done, in the tradition of Ref. 1, by taking the ASE to have a flat power spectrum and by approximating its gain as identical to the signal gain. This yields good performance estimates for solitary amplifiers; however, we show that it in general fails to describe even the sorts of small cascades that have been proposed for use in metropolitan areas.2 Although an accurate treatment sufficient for large cascades would require numerical representation of the amplifier gain spectra, a far simpler picture, making use of the average ASE gain, is found to describe small cascades with reasonable accuracy.
© 1992 Optical Society of America
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