Amplification of supercontinuum by semiconductor and Er-doped fiber optical amplifiers

Abstract

We demonstrated selective amplification of supercontinuum ultrashort optical pulses around 1300-nm and 1550-nm bands by injecting a supercontinuum source into a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) and an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), respectively. The broadband supercontinuum source was obtained by coupling femtosecond Ti:Sapphire laser pulses into a dual zero-dispersion wavelengths nonlinear photonic crystal fiber. The amplified supercontinuum has fully utilized the gain bandwidth of SOA and EDFA. However, the CW background amplified spontaneous emission increases as a result of the reflection at fiber ends to cause noisy pulse train.