Long Term, Stable, 115W Output from an Erbium Fiber Amplifier Pumped by a Raman Fiber Laser

Andrew Grimes*, Venkatapuram S. Sudarshanam, Anand Hariharan, Jeffrey W. Nicholson

We report on the development of an Erbium amplifier operating at 1550 nm with an output power of 115 W for 500 hours and power variation of less than 1% when run under an open loop, constant-current configuration. To achieve this level of stability, a Raman pump laser system was configured to optimize the output from a Raman resonator and the output wavelength filtering was staggered to prevent any degradation of downstream components, in particular the amplifier WDM that couples the pump and signal. The power level of this amplifier configuration is adequate for a ground-based transmitter to satellites in geosynchronous orbit at 37,000 km.