HIGH-STABLE ERBIUM SUPERLUMINESCENT FIBER OPTICAL SOURCES CREATION METHODS

Abstract

We present the overview of wideband Erbium doped superluminescent fiber sources (EDSFS) creation methods. This type of optical sources is mainly used in navigation accuracy class fiber-optical gyroscopes (FOG) production. For this application an optical source should have small coherence length to reduce FOG output signal error rate. Output signal errors are caused by different parasitic effects: reverse Rayleigh scattering, optical components mode swapping, Kerr effect. Consequently, the most important characteristics of EDSFS are central wavelength time and wide temperature range stability and optical spectrum width and shape. The spectrum shape is needed to be close to the Gaussian distribution to minimize time coherence function. The paper deals with major EDSFS instability reasons and their most effective spectral parameters stabilization and optimization methods. We consider various methods of output optical radiation spectrum correction, and problems connected with output radiation residual polarization, the EDSFS principle of operation, structure and their basic construction schemes, the overview of Erbium-doped active fibers for EDSFS creation. The conclusions on most effective output optical radiation stabilization methods are drawn.

Keywords

• Erbium doped source
• superluminescent source
• central wavelength stabilization
• optical power stabilization
• temperature relation
• optical spectrum stabilization
• optical fiber alloying
• coherence function
• optical source stabilization
• depolarized light