56.6 dB high gain L-band EDFA utilizing short-length highly-doped erbium rare-earth material

Abstract

In this paper, we experimentally investigate the performance of an efficient high gain L-band erbium-doped fiber (EDF) amplifier structure utilizing short-length highly-doped erbium rare-earth material with a single pump source. The amplifier gain and noise figure variation for different amplifier structures have been investigated. A filter is used to reduce the self-saturation effect and suppress the C-band amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise. The amplifier achieves a signal gain of 56.6 dB with a low noise figure of 4.8 dB at -50 dBm input signal power using only 8 m of EDF length. The amplifier gain shows significant improvement of 6 dB with C/L band coupler and 13 dB with tunable-band pass filter compared to amplifier structure without ASE suppression.