Enhancement on the generation of amplified spontaneous emission in thulium-doped silica fiber at 2 μm

This paper investigates the generation of the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) from thulium-doped silica fiber pumped at 1570 nm and 793 nm. The developed model provides the ASE spectral power as functions of the fiber length and the pump power under single-pass forward (SPF) and double-pass bi-directional (DPB) pumping schemes. A broadband ASE source generated by solving a set of rate and propagation equations for 1570 nm and 793 nm pumping transitions, and taking into account the influences of cross relaxation (CR) in both pump schemes. Our findings reveal that for 1570 nm pumping scheme, CR transition reduces the ASE generation. In addition, longer fluorescent lifetime increases the ASE power and reduces the pump power threshold. We numerically enhanced the generation of ASE broadband source from 1570 nm/1570 nm DPB pumping scheme. Our results show that 1570 nm/1570 nm DPB produces broadband ASE source with high slope efficiency and broader spectral bandwidth than that in SPF configuration. As a result, a 1570 nm/1570 nm DPB pump scheme is a suitable configuration to obtain higher power efficiency and a wider broadband source for the chosen thulium-doped silica fiber characteristics. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.