Abstract
Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) have many attractive features including high pump efficiency, immunity to saturation-induced crosstalk, and easy coupling to transmission fibers. However, the gain bandwidth of EDFAs is limited to 35 nm. In addition, the gain spectrum of the doped-fiber amplifiers is primarily determined by the dopant, and is thus difficult to change. Fiber optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs) do not suffer from these limitations, as they can in principle operate at any nominal wavelength, corresponding to the zero-dispersion wavelength λ0 of a fiber [1], and a large bandwidth can be obtained by setting the pump wavelength close to λ0. Although fiber OPA power gains over 30 dB have been demonstrated [2] [3] [4], to our knowledge the gain spectrum and the saturation characteristics have not been investigated. In this paper, we investigate theoretically and experimentally these features for a fiber OPA operating near λ0.
© 1995 Optical Society of America
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