Physical Model Approach for the Spectral Hole Burning Characteristics of Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers

A numerical simulation of an EDFA rate equation model for the calculation of amplifier gain with spectral hole burning (SHB) is proposed. Stark levels with similar spectroscopic properties are grouped to effective subpopulations in order to reproduce the physical origin of the inhomogeneous saturation characteristics of EDFA. Gaussian shaped contributions to the emission and absorption spectra are used to model the spectroscopic characteristics of the subpopulations. The influence of the number of considered subpopulations on the simulated SHB characteristic is investigated. We show that a modeling of subpopulations with Gaussian shaped transition spectra can be used to reproduce SHB characteristics, which are in good agreement with experimentally observed spectral hole widths and depths.