Optimal design of multi-pump Raman amplifiers

Summary form only given. There has been substantial interest in multi pump Raman amplifiers (MRA) with ultra-wide ultra-flat gain bandwidths. A few attemps have recently been made to solve the inverse amplifier design problem, but the achieved flatness proved to be far from optimal, and no attempt was made to compensate self-consistently for the signal-to-signal (STS) Raman scattering induced power tilt. In this paper we present an efficient and self-consistent design method that achieves the optimal net gain flatness.