Abstract

Optimisation and modelling of rare earth doped fibre lasers and amplifiers requires a knowledge of the concentration of the rare earth dopant in the fibre core. In much of the published modelling it is assumed that the concentration of the rare earth dopant is constant over the fibre core. While this assumption slightly simplifies the calculation, the main reason for the assumption is that the information about the spatial variation of the concentration is unavailable. Here we report an investigation of the measurement of the concentration profile of praseodymium doped fluorozirconate fibre by confocal microscopy.

© 1996 Optical Society of America