Design and Application of Erbium-Doped Photonic Crystal Fiber for Superfluorescent Fiber Source

A kind of erbium-doped photonic crystal fiber (EDPCF) designed for superfluorescent fiber source is reported. The proposed EDPCF is composed of an erbium-doped core and a cladding with seven rings of air holes arranged in a circular structure. The full-vector finite-element model of the EDPCF has been established and the relevant characteristics have been demonstrated via simulations. Using anisotropic perfectly matched layer as an absorbing boundary condition, the confinement loss 5.27×10
⁻¹²
dB/m has been calculated, which is far below the level of 0.01dB/km. Furthermore, the splice losses between the EDPCF and the two types step-index fibers have been estimated and it implies that the design fulfills low splice loss conditions theoretically. The designed EDPCF had been fabricated successfully. The experiment had been carried out to evaluate the splice losses between the EDPCF and the common single mode fibers. It is turned out that using manual aligning mode of the fiber fusion splicer can obtain lower splice loss than using automatic aligning mode for PCF splice. The EDPCF has already been applied in the superfluorescent light source as the gain medium.