Amplifiers

Ask RP Photonics for amplifier designs, various kinds of calculations, methods for the
characterization of amplifiers, etc.

Definition: devices for amplifying the power of light beams

An optical amplifier is a device which receives some input signal and generates an output signal
with higher optical power. Typically, inputs and outputs are laser beams, either propagating as
Gaussian beams in free space or in a fiber. The amplification occurs in a so-called gain medium,
which has to be “pumped” (i.e., provided with energy) from an external source. Most optical
amplifiers are either optically or electrically pumped.

Laser Amplifiers versus Amplifiers Based on Optical

Nonlinearities
Most optical amplifiers are laser amplifiers, where the amplification is based on stimulated
emission. Here, the gain medium contains some atoms, ions or molecules in an excited state,
which can be stimulated by the signal light to emit more light into the same radiation modes.
Such gain media are either insulators doped with some laser-active ions, or semiconductors
(→ semiconductor optical amplifiers), which can be electrically or optically pumped. Doped
insulators for laser amplification are laser crystals and glasses used in bulk form, or some types
of waveguides, such as optical fibers (→ fiber amplifiers). The laser-active ions are usually
either rare earth ions or (less frequently) transition-metal ions. A particularly important type of
laser amplifier is the erbium-doped fiber amplifier, which is used mostly for optical fiber
communications.

In addition to stimulated emission, there also exist other physical mechanisms for optical
amplification, which are based on various types of optical nonlinearities. Optical parametric
amplifiers are usually based on a medium with χ(2) nonlinearity, but there are also parametric
fiber devices using the χ(3) nonlinearity of a fiber. Other types of nonlinear amplifiers are Raman
amplifiers and Brillouin amplifiers, exploiting the delayed nonlinear response of a medium.

An important difference between laser amplifiers and amplifiers based on nonlinearities is that
laser amplifiers can store some amount of energy, whereas nonlinear amplifiers provide gain
only as long as the pump light is present.

Multipass Arrangements, Regenerative Amplifiers, and

Amplifier Chains
A bulk-optical laser amplifier often provides only a moderate amount of gain, typically only few
decibels. This applies particularly to ultrashort pulse amplifiers, since they must be based on
broadband gain media, which tend to have lower emission cross sections. The effective gain may
then be increased either by arranging for multiple passes of the radiation through the same
amplifier medium, or by using several amplifiers in a sequence (→ amplifier chains).

Figure 1: Setup of a multipass femtosecond amplifier.

Multipass operation (Figure 1) can be achieved with combinations of mirrors (for several passes
with slightly different angular directions), or (mostly for ultrashort pulses) with regenerative
amplifiers.

For very large amplification factors, multi-stage amplifiers (amplifier chains) are often better
suited. For example, a regenerative amplifier may amplify pulses to an energy of a few
millijoules, and a multipass amplifier further boosts the pulse energy to hundreds of millijoules.
Between the amplifier stages, the pulses can be spatially or spectrally filtered in various ways,
helping to achieve a high beam quality and/or a shorter pulse duration.

Gain Saturation
For high values of the input light intensity or fluence, the amplification factor of a gain medium
saturates, i.e., is reduced (→ gain saturation). This is a natural consequence of the fact that an
amplifier cannot add arbitrary levels of energy or power to an input signal. However, as laser
amplifiers (particularly those based on solid-state gain media) store some amount of energy in
the gain medium, this energy can be extracted within a very short time. Therefore, during some
short time interval the output power can exceed the pump power by many orders of magnitude.

Detrimental Effects
For high gain, weak parasitic reflections can cause parasitic lasing, i.e., oscillation without an
input signal, or additional output components not caused by the input signal. This effect then
limits the achievable gain. Even without any parasitic reflections, amplified spontaneous
emission may extract a significant power from an amplifier.

A related effect is that amplifiers also add some excess noise to the output. This applies not only
to laser amplifiers, where excess noise can partly be explained as the effect of spontaneous
emission, but also to nonlinear amplifiers.

Ultrafast Amplifiers
Amplifiers of different kind may also be used for amplifying ultrashort pulses. In some cases, a
high repetition rate pulse train is amplified, leading to a high average power while the pulse
energy remains moderate. In other cases, a much higher gain is applied to pulses at lower
repetition rates, leading to high pulse energies and correspondingly huge peak powers. A number
of special aspects apply to such devices, and are discussed in the article on ultrafast amplifiers.

Important Parameters of an Optical Amplifier

Important parameters of an optical amplifier include:

• the maximum gain, specified as an amplification factor or in decibels (dB)

• the saturation power, which is related to the gain efficiency
• the saturated output power (for a given pump power)
• the power efficiency and pump power requirements
• the saturation energy
• the time of energy storage (→ upper-state lifetime)
• the gain bandwidth (and possibly smoothness of gain spectrum)
• the noise figure and possibly more detailed noise specifications
• the sensitivity to back-reflections

Different kinds of amplifiers differ very much e.g. in terms of saturation properties. For example,
rare-earth-doped gain media can store substantial amounts of energy, whereas optical parametric
amplifiers provide amplification only as long as the pump beam is present. As another example,
semiconductor optical amplifiers store much less energy than fiber amplifiers, and this has
important implications for optical fiber communications.

Applications
Typical applications of optical amplifiers are:

• An amplifier can boost the (average) power of a laser output to higher levels (→ master
oscillator power amplifier = MOPA).
• It can generate extremely high peak powers, particularly in ultrashort pulses, if the stored
energy is extracted within a short time.
• It can amplify weak signals before photodetection, and thus reduce the detection noise,
unless the added amplifier noise is large.
• In long fiber-optic links for optical fiber communications, the optical power level has to
be raised between long sections of fiber before the information is lost in the noise.

See also: amplifier noise, amplified spontaneous emission, amplification factor, fiber amplifiers,
Raman amplifiers, semiconductor optical amplifiers, optical parametric amplifiers, regenerative
amplifiers, ultrafast amplifiers, master oscillator power amplifier, divided-pulse amplification