Modeling optimization design and amplification characteristics of O-band irregular Bragg bismuth-doped fiber amplifier

Abstract

In recent years, O-band bismuth-doped fiber amplifier (BDFA) have been rapidly developed due to the fluorescence properties of bismuth-doped glass in the near-infrared (NIR) band, while there are still few studies on bismuth-doped fibers (BDF) with large mode fields as of now. In addition, although the use of a double-pass structure on the amplifier can lead to gain improvement, this also deteriorates the noise figure (NF). Therefore, the study of bismuth-doped fibers with large mode-field areas is a promising path to develop high-performance BDFA. In this work, taking a commercial bismuth-doped fiber as an instance, we first measured the refractive index distribution of the BDF in the O-band using a self-developed fiber refractive index tester, and thereby obtained its actual mode-field area. Then, based on this we further propose an irregular Bragg bismuth-doped fiber with the refractive index growing layer by layer. The results suggests that the effective mode-field area of this fiber reaches 401 um2 at 1320 nm, which is nearly 5.8 times that of a common single-mode BDF. Finally, we performed numerical simulations of the amplification performance based on this fiber. Under the condition of total pumping power of 8 W, the signal with −20 dBm input power obtains a gain of more than 54 dB and an NF of less than 5 dB at 1320 nm wavelength. This work demonstrates the great potential of this Bragg bismuth-doped fiber as an O-band high-gain amplifier and high-power laser.

Keywords

• Bragg
• Fiber
• Amplifier
• Noise
• BDFA