Abstract

The increasing interest in erbium-doped fibers (EDF’s) for optical amplifiers has recently led to highly optimized fibers. One of the most attractive properties of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA’s) is low noise. The noise properties of EDFA’s have been extensively analyzed.¹ This generated noise, corresponding to amplified spontaneous emission (ASE), may be useful to generate high-power broadband monomode sources with very short coherence lengths. Such sources are suitable for optical-fiber sensor applications and are particularly effective in reducing coherence noise and Kerr-effect drift² in fiber-optic gyroscopes (FOG’s). Some authors of previous papers carefully studied such sources when they were pumped by argon lasers³ or by laser diodes with relatively poor efficiencies.⁴ Thus, we were quite far from compact available devices. In this paper we propose an analysis of several configurations of compact devices that deliver over 16 mW with efficiencies of up to 50%. The fibers used in these devices resulted from optimization studies carried out for EDFA’s.⁵

© 1991 Optical Society of America