Cladding-Pumped Er/Yb-Co-Doped Fiber Amplifier for Multi-Channel Operation
The Institute of Solid State Physics, University of Latvia, as a Center of Excellence, has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017-TeamingPhase2 under grant agreement No. 739508, project CAMART2. We express our gratitude to rer. nat. Nicoletta Haarlammert from Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF for the refractive index measurements of ytterbium/erbium-co-doped fibers. This work is supported by the European Regional Development Fund project No. 1.1.1.1/18/A/068.
Cladding-Pumped Erbium/Ytterbium Co-Doped Fiber Amplifier for C-Band Operation in Optical Networks
Space-division multiplexing (SDM) attracts attention to cladding-pumped optical amplifiers, but they suffer from a low pump power conversion efficiency. To address this issue, ytterbium (Yb3+) and erbium (Er3+) co-doping is considered as an effective approach. However, it changes the gain profile of Er3+-doped fiber amplifiers and induces the gain difference between optical wavelengths in the C-band, significantly limiting the effective band of the dense wavelength-division multiplexed (DWDM) system. This paper is devoted to a detailed study of a cladding-pumped Er3+/Yb3+ co-doped fiber amplifier (EYDFA) through numerical simulations aiming to identify a configuration, before assembling a s…
Optical Frequency Combs Generated in Silica Microspheres in the Telecommunication C-, U-, and E-Bands
Optical frequency combs (OFCs) generated in microresonators with whispering gallery modes are demanded for different applications including telecommunications. Extending operating spectral ranges is an important problem for wavelength-division multiplexing systems based on microresonators. We demonstrate experimentally three spectrally separated OFCs in the C-, U-, and E-bands in silica microspheres which, in principle, can be used for telecommunication applications. For qualitative explanation of the OFC generation in the sidebands, we calculated gain coefficients and gain bandwidths for degenerate four-wave mixing (FWM) processes. We also attained a regime when the pump frequency was in t…
Demonstration of a fiber optical communication system employing a silica microsphere-based OFC source.
The fabrication of microsphere resonators and the generation of optical frequency combs (OFC) have achieved a significant breakthrough in the past decade. Despite these advances, no studies have reported the experimental implementation and demonstration of silica microsphere OFCs for data transmission. In this work, to the best of our knowledge, we experimentally for the first time present a designed silica microsphere whispering-gallery-mode microresonator (WGMR) OFC as a C-band light source where 400 GHz spaced carriers provide data transmission of up to 10 Gbps NRZ-OOK modulated signals over the standard ITU-T G.652 telecom fiber span of 20 km in length. A proof-of-concept experiment is …
Frequency comb generation in whispering gallery mode silica microsphere resonators
Optical frequency combs (OFC) using different kinds of whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) microresonators have already shown different applications and especially their applications in fiber optical communication systems as replacements of laser-arrays. For this application the free spectral range (FSR) of 200 GHz or less is desirable. Besides the fabrication material for microspheres, the resonator radius can be modified to change the FSR. In this paper use of silica microspheres for OFC represents an inexpensive alternative over the other microcombs: microring, microdisk, and microtoroid. We experimentally present a microsphere fabrication process from a different kind of silica (SiO2) fibers …
Recent Developments in Cladding-Pumped Doped Fiber Amplifiers for Telecommunications Systems
This paper aims to review recent developments in the field of doped fiber-based optical amplifiers and serve as a reference for promising optical signal amplification techniques that may be useful for practical implementation in high-capacity and cost-efficient telecommunications systems. The main focus is put on different rare-earth dopant elements, double-clad fibers, and optical couplers for cladding-pumping technique. It is found that codoped double-clad fiber-based amplifiers currently have attained the main research interest and show possible application also in multichannel fiber optical transmission systems. Additionally, we have compared different free space and waveguide construct…