Saturation induced polarized emission in Erbium-Doped-Fiber Lasers

Abstract

Erbium doped fiber amplifiers are receiving great attention because of their capability of amplifying signals traveling in the third low-attenuation window of telecommunication fibers. It has been shown that the signal gain achieved in such amplifiers may be of the order of 40dB or more(1), with saturation powers as large as 12.5 dBm. One interesting feature of such amplifiers is the insensitivity to the signal polarization state: by rotating the linear polarization of the signal, relative to a linearly polarized pump, gain variations of less than 0.2 dB have been measured(2).