Resonant fluorescence line narrowing measurements in erbium-doped glasses for optical amplifiers

Rapid development of optical fiber amplifiers, and more especially of the erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) during the last decade, has benefited from extensive work on the configuration of the system itself: determination of pump wavelength, pumping configuration, improvement of noise performance, etc. However, less effort have been dedicated to study the interaction that influences the spectral profile of the gain bandwidth and particularly the relation between the glass composition and the spectroscopy of erbium. Here, we report a systematic determination of key parameters responsible for the global profile of the gain bandwidth: stark splitting, homogeneous broadening, and inhomogeneous broadening. The correlation between these parameters and the glass structure from one part and the behavior of the EDFA in amplification regime from another part is discussed. The quasiregular crystal-field splitting of tellurite and fluoride glasses is found to correlate well with the flatness of the gain profile. Moreover, the low-temperature homogeneous bandwidths extrapolated to room temperature can be correlated to the saturation spectral hole widths measured in the amplification regime.