| 摘要 |
<p>An optical fiber amplifier utilizing a multi-component glass optical fiber highly doped with rare-earth ions such as erbium to exhibit high gain per unit length, enabling the use of short fiber strands to achieve the needed gain in practical fiber optical communication networks. Suitable multi-component glass optical fiber amplifiers, such as for example high-gain phosphate optical glass fiber amplifiers, can be integrated onto a substrate to form an integrated optics amplifier module. An optical pump such as a semiconductor laser of suitable wavelength is used to promote gain inversion of erbium ions and ultimately provide power amplification of a given input signal. Gain inversion is enhanced in erbium doped phosphate glass fibers by co-doping with ytterbium. A phosphate fiber amplifier or an integrated optics amplifier module utilizing this power amplification can be combined with other components such as splitters, combiners, modulators, optical switches or arrayed waveguide gratings to form lossless or amplified components that do not suffer from insertion loss when added to an optical network. The fiber amplifier can be a single fiber or an array of fibers. Further, multi-component glass optical fibers, such as for example the phosphate glass fibers, can be designed with a temperature coefficient of refractive index close to zero enabling proper mode performance as ambient temperatures or induced heating changes the temperature of the phosphate glass fiber. With the high gain that is achieved, single mode fibers can be pumped by relatively inexpensive multi-mode laser diodes. A phosphate glass composition in the phosphate glass fibers includes erbium concentrations of at least 1.5 weight percentage, preferably further including ytterbium from 0 to 30 weight percentage, and preferably greater than 5 weight percentage.</p> |
