Rare Earth Doped Fiber Amplifiers: Erbium Operation

This lecture covers rare earth doped fiber amplifiers, which use fibers doped with elements like erbium to amplify signals. The properties of these amplifiers depend on the dopant used, such as erbium, holmium, neodymium, thulium, or ytterbium. Erbium doped fiber amplifiers are particularly popular due to their operation at 1550 nm wavelength, achieved by doping the fiber core with Erbium Er3+. The lecture explains the energy levels of erbium atoms, the operation of erbium doped fiber amplifiers, and the factors affecting their gain spectrum. It also discusses the pumping choices for these amplifiers, including forward and backward pumping with 980 nm or 1480 nm lasers. The advantages of erbium doped fiber amplifiers, such as high gain efficiency and low crosstalk, are highlighted, along with their limitations like sensitivity to traffic fluctuations and size.

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Optical amplifier

An optical amplifier is a device that amplifies an optical signal directly, without the need to first convert it to an electrical signal. An optical amplifier may be thought of as a laser without an optical cavity, or one in which feedback from the cavity is suppressed. Optical amplifiers are important in optical communication and laser physics. They are used as optical repeaters in the long distance fiberoptic cables which carry much of the world's telecommunication links.

Optical pumping

Optical pumping is a process in which light is used to raise (or "pump") electrons from a lower energy level in an atom or molecule to a higher one. It is commonly used in laser construction to pump the active laser medium so as to achieve population inversion. The technique was developed by the 1966 Nobel Prize winner Alfred Kastler in the early 1950s. Optical pumping is also used to cyclically pump electrons bound within an atom or molecule to a well-defined quantum state.

Energy level

A quantum mechanical system or particle that is bound—that is, confined spatially—can only take on certain discrete values of energy, called energy levels. This contrasts with classical particles, which can have any amount of energy. The term is commonly used for the energy levels of the electrons in atoms, ions, or molecules, which are bound by the electric field of the nucleus, but can also refer to energy levels of nuclei or vibrational or rotational energy levels in molecules.

Noise figure

Noise figure (NF) and noise factor (F) are figures of merit that indicate degradation of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that is caused by components in a signal chain. These figures of merit are used to evaluate the performance of an amplifier or a radio receiver, with lower values indicating better performance. The noise factor is defined as the ratio of the output noise power of a device to the portion thereof attributable to thermal noise in the input termination at standard noise temperature T0 (usually 290 K).

Optical fiber

An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber and find wide usage in fiber-optic communications, where they permit transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data transfer rates) than electrical cables.