Low transmission penalty dual-stage broadband discrete Raman amplifier

Abstract

We present a broadband (>70nm), dual stage, discrete Raman amplifier designed with small and standard core fibres to maximize gain and minimize nonlinearity. The amplifier provides ~19.5dB net gain, 22.5dBm saturation output power and a noise figure of <7.2dB. 120Gb/s DP-QPSK transmission over 38x80km at a pre-FEC BER <3.8x10^-3 is demonstrated.