Abstract

There has been great interest in development of polymer optical fibers (POFs) for local area networks (LANs), datalinks, applications for automobile and medical applications etc., because of virtues, such as easy processing, handling, low cost and large diameter, enabling high efficiencies of fiber coupling and beam insertion.⁽¹⁾ In those days, highly developed Er³⁺-doped optical fiber amplifier can obtain much more functional applications. On the other hand, until now, POF system has no amplifying element, so applications of POFs are positioned in hopeless situation. Our proposals and experiment presented in this paper concerning graded-index (GI) Rhodamine B doped POF-Amplifiers (POFA) could give a break-through on such situation. The POFA gave sufficient gain with extremely short length of fiber for its large cross sections. Also, high-power amplification was tried with large core diameter fiber.

© 1993 Optical Society of America