Spontaneous Rayleigh Backscattering Raman lasing with Fiber Bragg Gratting

Two of the critical devices in every high bandwidth network, from the physical level point of view, are lasers and wideband amplifiers. Distributed Raman amplification (DRA) is nowadays recognized as an enabling technology for high capacity systems. DRA usually requires high pump powers and, consequently, is inevitably accompanied by the increased penalties of associated intrinsic nonlinear phenomena (eg. nonlinear part of the refraction index and Rayleigh backscattering (RB)). The RB, has been studied by many authors, and has been usually taken as impairment to signal transmission (Hendley and Agarwal, 2004). In this work, we demonstrate the control of C-band RB spontaneous emission (ASE) pumped by an E-band Raman laser, using a set of multiple fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) (Teixeira et al., 2005). The presented technique takes advantage from the RB effects, which, in conjunction with the gratings, enables the generation of a controlled fibre laser effect simultaneously with gain in the C-Band. We compare the experimental results with the ones from a numerical model.