In the last decade, high energy and high peak power pulsed fibre lasers have found numerous applications in different industrial and scientific fields. They are commonly based on a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) architecture, that features a high power fibre amplifier stage based on a rare earth (RE) doped silica glass fibre. However, heavy doping of silica fibres is limited by clustering, therefore the fibres length has to be increased to several meters for efficient amplification. The consequence is an unwanted growth of nonlinearities along with fibre length, that impairs considerably the temporal pulse properties of the amplifier and prevents to achieve high peak power. Phosphate glasses have demonstrated in last years to be an alternative host material to silica glasses for RE doped optical fibres. In fact, they can incorporate high amounts of RE ions (up to 1021 ions/cm3) without clustering, thus allowing the fabrication of extremely compact active devices with high gain per unit length. Moreover, they possess a large glass forming range, good thermo-mechanical and chemical properties, low nonlinear refractive index and no evidence of photodarkening even at high population inversion. In this work we present a new phosphate glass host composition, that was in-house developed in order to obtain a glass host stable, robust, able to incorporate high amount of RE ions and suitable for fibre drawing. Several Er3+-doped phosphate glass samples were fabricated by doping the developed host glass with concentrations of Er3+ up to 10 mol%. The samples were then thoroughly characterized in order to measure their physical, thermal and spectroscopic properties. Among others, differential thermal analysis, dilatometry, refractive index measurement, UV-VIS-NIR and FTIR absorption spectroscopies were carried out on all samples. All prepared glass samples were homogeneous and presented a very good thermal stability (ΔT = Tx-Tg > 400 ºC) which suggested that these glasses are suitable for performing fabrication and crystal-free fiber drawing. The effect of Er3+ ions concentration on emission spectra and lifetimes of Er3+:4I13/2 excited energy level was carefully investigated in order to study the concentration quenching effect on luminescence performance, with the aim to identify the most suitable Er-doping level for the development of a phosphate short length optical fibre amplifier.

Highly Er3+-doped phosphate glass for short length optical fibre amplifier / Boetti, NADIA GIOVANNA; Pugliese, Diego; CECI GINISTRELLI, Edoardo; Bertone, Elisa; Abrate, S.; Milanese, Daniel. - ELETTRONICO. - (2015). (Intervento presentato al convegno CLEO/Europe-EQEC 2015 tenutosi a Munich nel 21-25 June 2015).

Highly Er3+-doped phosphate glass for short length optical fibre amplifier

BOETTI, NADIA GIOVANNA;PUGLIESE, DIEGO;CECI GINISTRELLI, EDOARDO;BERTONE, ELISA;MILANESE, DANIEL
2015

Abstract

In the last decade, high energy and high peak power pulsed fibre lasers have found numerous applications in different industrial and scientific fields. They are commonly based on a master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) architecture, that features a high power fibre amplifier stage based on a rare earth (RE) doped silica glass fibre. However, heavy doping of silica fibres is limited by clustering, therefore the fibres length has to be increased to several meters for efficient amplification. The consequence is an unwanted growth of nonlinearities along with fibre length, that impairs considerably the temporal pulse properties of the amplifier and prevents to achieve high peak power. Phosphate glasses have demonstrated in last years to be an alternative host material to silica glasses for RE doped optical fibres. In fact, they can incorporate high amounts of RE ions (up to 1021 ions/cm3) without clustering, thus allowing the fabrication of extremely compact active devices with high gain per unit length. Moreover, they possess a large glass forming range, good thermo-mechanical and chemical properties, low nonlinear refractive index and no evidence of photodarkening even at high population inversion. In this work we present a new phosphate glass host composition, that was in-house developed in order to obtain a glass host stable, robust, able to incorporate high amount of RE ions and suitable for fibre drawing. Several Er3+-doped phosphate glass samples were fabricated by doping the developed host glass with concentrations of Er3+ up to 10 mol%. The samples were then thoroughly characterized in order to measure their physical, thermal and spectroscopic properties. Among others, differential thermal analysis, dilatometry, refractive index measurement, UV-VIS-NIR and FTIR absorption spectroscopies were carried out on all samples. All prepared glass samples were homogeneous and presented a very good thermal stability (ΔT = Tx-Tg > 400 ºC) which suggested that these glasses are suitable for performing fabrication and crystal-free fiber drawing. The effect of Er3+ ions concentration on emission spectra and lifetimes of Er3+:4I13/2 excited energy level was carefully investigated in order to study the concentration quenching effect on luminescence performance, with the aim to identify the most suitable Er-doping level for the development of a phosphate short length optical fibre amplifier.
2015
978-1-4673-7475-0
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11583/2620406
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