Experimental investigation of a fiber Bragg grating integrated optical limiting amplifier with high dynamic range

Abstract

By inserting a bidirectional erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) in between an optical circulator and a fiber Bragg grating (FBG), we realize an FBG-integrated optical limiting amplifier (OLA) with high dynamic range. The dual-pass OLA has a wide dynamic range of over 40 dB and a saturation signal output power of about 13.0 dBm. The performance of dual-pass OLA has no obvious degradation due to back reflection of the amplified signal. A negligible power penalty of about 0.3 dB is observed when compared with other conventional configurations. The FBG-integrated OLA configuration has potential application in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems where high saturated power is needed for multichannel transmission. (C) 1998 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.