Broadband Chromium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers for Next-Generation Optical Communication Systems

We report the first experimental breakthrough of a net gain of optical signals in a broadband chromium-doped fiber amplifier (CDFA) for next-generation optical communication systems. Current fiber amplifiers, including commercial erbium-doped fiber amplifier, cover only a relatively small portion of the entire transmission bandwidths (1300-1600 nm) of the low-loss windows of silica fibers. The newly developed CDFAs have opened up the possibility of utilizing the 300-nm entire spectrum of the low-loss fibers to further increase the transmission capacity. In this paper, we present the experimental demonstration of a net gain of 1.2 dB employing gain enhancement technique. With the help of an optical-fiber system examination for the CDFA, a 40-Gb/s error-floor free data transmission was successfully demonstrated by realizing the high-speed transmission of signal with gain through the chromium-doped fibers (CDFs). Further gain improvement in the CDFAs employing few-mode or single-mode CDFs will be presented and discussed.