Demonstration of Cladding-Pumped Six-Core Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier

We demonstrate cladding-pumped six-core Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) using two different pump coupling schemes: edge-coupled and side-coupled pumping, where a single multimode laser diode can be applied to pump all cores. Using two in-line cladding-pumped EDFAs at the input and output of a 31-km coupled-six-core fiber, we realized 465-km space-division multiplexing and wavelength division multiplexing transmission in a recirculating loop and achieved a spectral efficiency of 18 bits/s/Hz. Through side-coupled pumping, the cladding-pumped six-core EDFA produced >18-dBm output power per core and had <;6-dB noise figure across the C-band.