A Radiation-Balanced Silica Fiber Amplifier
Abstract
We report what we believe to be the first radiation-balanced fiber amplifier - a device that provides optical gain while experiencing no temperature rise. The gain medium is a silica fiber with a 21 um-diameter core highly doped with Yb3+ (2.52 wt.%) and co doped with 2.00 wt.% Al to reduce concentration quenching. The amplifier was core-pumped with 1040 nm light to create anti-Stokes fluorescence (ASF) cooling and gain in the core at 1064 nm. Using a custom slow-light FBG sensor with mK resolution, temperature measurements were performed at multiple locations along the amplifier fiber. A 4.35-m fiber pumped with 2.62 W produced 17 dB of gain while the average fiber temperature remained slightly below room temperature. This advancement is a fundamental step toward the creation of ultra-stable lasers necessary to many applications, especially low-noise sensing and high-precision metrology.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2103.02698,
title = {A Radiation-Balanced Silica Fiber Amplifier},
author = {Jennifer M. Knall and Magnus Engholm and Tommy Boilard and Martin Bernier and Michel J. F. Digonnet},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.02698},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
8 pages including the supplementary material (SM). 5 figures in the main text, 2 in the SM