Abstract
As fiber nonlinearity becomes more important in communications applications, both as a problem and as a solution to problems, it is useful to have high optical powers available at wavelengths within the erbium-amplifier bandwidth. Although Nd-YAG-pumped codoped erbium amplifiers that can provide cw output powers of hundreds of milliwatts1 are available commercially, higher powers would be useful. The long (≈10 ms) spontaneous lifetime of the 4I13/2 level in erbium can be exploited to obtain high-peak-power pulses by using pulse trains with very low duty factors. Low-duty-factor amplification has been used previously in linear geometries of two amplifiers to obtain 100-W, 1-nJ single-spatial-mode pulses2 in a fiber and in linear geometries of three amplifiers to obtain 111-kW, 0.5-mJ multiple-spatial-mode pulses in air.3 Here we use a single gain stage in a ring geometry to obtain 1.8-kW, 1.1-μJ pulses in a single-mode output fiber.
© 1994 Optical Society of America
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