Annual Meeting Optical Society of America
Complex susceptibility of rare earth-doped fiber amplifiers in the saturation regime
K. Alan Shore, R. Halus
Abstract
A basic understanding of the susceptibility of fiber amplifiers (SOFA) is required to undertake device optimization, e.g., for uses in optical communications systems. In recent work Desurvire1 has developed a semiclassical treatment of the SOFA for erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) taking account of the Stark splitting of the energy levels in the Er-doped glass. That work, which utilized the standard Kramers-Kronig relationships, was applicable to the unsaturated regime of operation. In this contribution, generalized Kramers-Kronig relations2 are utilized to obtain analytical expressions for the SOFA valid even in the saturation regime. It is then shown how, given experimentally measurable absorption cross-sections, the SOFA may be calculated in any operating conditions. In this way gain and refractive-index changes occurring in EDFAs may be deduced, again having universal validity.