An analytical formulation of the transient response of gain-clamped EDFA's

A small-signal analytical model describing transients within a gain-clamped erbium-doped fiber amplifier is presented. The model gives an accurate description of the relaxation oscillations experienced by surviving channels when there are small input variations to the amplifier. The model also provides good approximations for medium input variations, conditional on the amplifier being highly saturated by the gain-clamping lasing signal. This is demonstrated by agreement between our analytical model and numerical simulations.