Effects of self-saturation in an erbium-doped fiber amplifier

The dependence of erbium-doped fiber amplifier performance on amplifier self-saturation is studied experimentally by tuning the pump wavelength over a 5-nm band centered at 980 nm. Gain and noise figure are degraded at the peak pump absorption wavelength, which shows the strongest effect of amplifie...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mahdi, M.A., Thirumeni, S., Poopalan, P., Selvakennedy, S., Adikan, Faisal Rafiq Mahamd, Chan, W.Y., Ahmad, Harith
Format: Article
Published: Elsevier 2000
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Summary:The dependence of erbium-doped fiber amplifier performance on amplifier self-saturation is studied experimentally by tuning the pump wavelength over a 5-nm band centered at 980 nm. Gain and noise figure are degraded at the peak pump absorption wavelength, which shows the strongest effect of amplifier self-saturation. It is shown experimentally that tuning the pump wavelength away from the peak pump absorption provides 1-2 dB improvement in pump-to-signal conversion. The effect of amplifier self-saturation is also dependent on the signal wavelength where high gain and noise figure penalties are obtained at the 1530-nm (+/-5 nm) band. (C) 2000 Academic Press.