BASIS FOR A POLARIZED SUPERFLUORESCENT FIBER SOURCE WITH INCREASED EFFICIENCY

We propose to produce a superfluorescent fiber source (SFS) with a lin early polarized output by inserting a discrete polarizer near the midd le of a polarization-maintaining Er-doped fiber. We show that with a r elatively low-loss polarizer (<0.5 dB) the output power of the polariz ed SFS is predicted to approach that of a standard, unpolarized SFS, i .e., the power of the desired polarization mode is nearly doubled. The efficiency of this source depends weakly on the polarizer location an d extinction ratio, although it depends strongly on its insertion loss . (C) 1996 Optical Society of America