Continuous-wave silica-based erbium-doped fibre lasers

This review paper on erbium-doped fibre laser (EDFL) covers a broad range of designs and applications related to the field of optical fibre telecommunication. After a brief historical overview of EDFL technology in Section 1, Section 2 will present the theoretical background necessary to appreciate the experimental results and applications discussed later. A detailed review of EDFL developments will be given in Section 3, which is divided in three parts. The first part will focus on tuneable EDFLs, while the second part is concerned with multifrequency EDFLs. The third sub-section will be devoted to superfluorescent fibre sources. Throughout Section 3, illustrative examples of various EDFL designs and applications will be presented. Section 4 will conclude this review by recalling the key issues related to EDFL development and will offer some insights concerning future research trends.