Effects of self-saturation in an erbium-doped fiber amplifier

The dependence of erbium-doped fiber amplifier performance on amplifier sel f-saturation is studied experimentally by tuning the pump wavelength over a 5-nm band centered at 980 nm. Gain and noise figure are degraded at the pe ak pump absorption wavelength, which shows the strongest effect of amplifie r self-saturation. It is shown experimentally that tuning the pump waveleng th away from the peak pump absorption provides 1-2 dB improvement in pump-t o-signal conversion. The effect of amplifier self-saturation is also depend ent on the signal wavelength where high gain and noise figure penalties are obtained at the 1530-nm (+/-5 nm) band. (C) 2000 Academic Press.