Abstract

Paper summary: Erbium-doped superfluorescent fiber sources (SFSs) have been extensively studied in nearly past twenty years in order to meet the requirement of high-accuracy interferometric fiber-optic gyroscopes (IFOG). Due to the gyroscope scale factor depends on the mean wavelength of SFS, for a high-accuracy IFOG, the mean wavelength stability has been struggling to satisfy the stringent requirement in parts per million (ppm). However, in many cases, the IFOGs are performed in lower temperature and extreme circumstances, which has simultaneously been challenging for the mean wavelength stability of SFSs.

The mean wavelength stability is primarily affected by pump power, pump wavelength, optical feedback, polarization effects and thermal effect of erbium-doped fiber. Many effective methods have been reported to suppress the influence factors in the references. The SFS mean wavelength stability is in the range of a few to a few tens of ppm at the room temperature, but it is required research for further improvement.

In this paper, we reported a quasi-Gaussian erbium-doped superfluorescent photonic crystal fiber source in order to improve the SFS mean wavelength stability in lower temperature and extreme circumstances. Modifying the out spectral profile of the SFS as a quasi-Gaussian profile by the choice of suitable EDPCF length and pump power was adopted to suppress gain competition of erbium-doped fiber, which gave rise to the mean wavelength fluctuate with temperature variation. In addition, employing EDPCF has further improved the properties of environment perturbation insensitivity and excellent transmission performance of the conventional erbium-doped fiber. Consequently, a 28.2 ppm mean wavelength stability of the prototype SFS is achieved with the temperature change from 10 °C to -40 °C. This will be a potential method in order to improve the performance of SFS for the high-accuracy IFOG.

© 2012 Optical Society of America