Abstract

Erbium doped fiber amplifiers are receiving great attention because of their capability of amplifying signals traveling in the third low-attenuation window of telecommunication fibers. It has been shown that the signal gain achieved in such amplifiers may be of the order of 40dB or more⁽¹⁾, with saturation powers as large as 12.5 dBm. One interesting feature of such amplifiers is the insensitivity to the signal polarization state: by rotating the linear polarization of the signal, relative to a linearly polarized pump, gain variations of less than 0.2 dB have been measured⁽²⁾.

© 1990 Optical Society of America