Abstract

We give the details of the fabrication approach that we follow to prepare Erbium-doped photonic crystal fibers and the basic characterization of these fibers. The fibers were fabricated using the conventional stack-and-draw technique. The preforms were prepared combining pure silica capillaries to form a hexagonal lattice and an Erbium doped wire to define the core. Fibers with different pitch, air filling fraction and core diameter have been prepared. The preliminary experiments show fairly good results for the gain of the fibers, giving up to 75 dB internal gain for a fiber length of 21 m and 156 mW pump power. Ring lasers made with these fibers give up to 13 mW output power at 1550 nm, using a fiber length of 13 m and a pump power of 1555 mW, which corresponds to an optical power efficiency above 8%.

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