Fast method for obtaining erbium-doped fibre intrinsic parameters

The authors present a fast, simple and nondestructive method to characterise rare-earth-doped fibres (REDF). They measure the response of the fibre to a step-like pulse excitation and obtain, from a single measurement, the intrinsic saturation power, the excited-state lifetime and the linear absorption coefficient, which are fundamental for a complete modelling of REDF devices. They demonstrate the method using different erbium-doped fibres (EDF)