Design and fabrication of Pr-doped fluoride glass optical fibres for efficient 1.3µm amplifiers

Jha, A., Naftaly, M., Jordery, S., Samson, B.N., Taylor, E.R., Hewak, D.W., Payne, David, Poulain, M. and Baro, M.D. (1994) Design and fabrication of Pr-doped fluoride glass optical fibres for efficient 1.3µm amplifiers. In Euro Cost Workshop '94 - Optical Telecommunications Nice France. pp. 95-98 .

Abstract

Silica optical fibre technology for communication networks has grown rapidly in the last 15 years, and its development has made possible broadband telecommunications. The bandwidth of silica-based passive optical network (PON) is many orders of magnitude larger than that of copper coaxial cables (~20 MHz over 3-5 km). As a result, optical fibres have revolutionised telephone networks. Current figures suggest that approximately 80% of British telephone traffic is carried by optical fibres. By the year 2015, the entire Japanese telephone network will be optical fibre-based, enabling it to carry data and video via telephone cables into every home. A large component of the world-wide optical fibre system constitute the terrestrial networks which utilise the second transmission window of silica at 1.3µm. At this wavelength, no optical amplifier is as yet commercially available, necessitating the use of electronic repeaters. By contrast, for the lowest-loss window at 1.5µm, efficient high gain Er doped optical amplifiers have been developed and are widely available. Compared with optical amplifiers, electronic repeaters are more expensive, slower and less flexible in operation. The major motivation for the current project is the need for an efficient optical fibre amplifier operating in the 1.3µm window. The purpose of the project is to design and develop such amplifier based on Pr doped fluoride fibres.

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Contributors

Author: D.W. Hewak

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