Bidirectional Cladding-Pumped Multicore EDFA and its Optimization for Energy Efficiency by Tuning Pump Condition

This work investigates the feasibility of improving the energy efficiency of a cladding-pumped multicore (MC) EDFA by utilizing bidirectional (BD) pumping. The main issue with the current standard equalization of EDFA output is the indispensable optical power loss caused the reduced optical amplification efficiency of the EDFA. Our previous work demonstrated that the optical power loss due to equalization can be reduced by controlling the optical power ratio of the forward and backward pumps. This leads to improved energy efficiency of the signal amplification and equalization of both the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and spatial division multiplexing (SDM). In this paper, we report our detailed investigation into the tuning amplification characteristics of the BD-MC-EDFA. Our main focus was the gain, noise figure (NF), and gain shape of a 7-core BD-MC-EDFA prototype when forward and backward optical pump power was changed. Under 8 W of total optical pump power, the percentage of 60% forward cladding optical pump power was found to be optimal for efficiency considering the minimum output optical power loss due to equalization. This condition translates into a 1.7% pump conversion efficiency (PCE) improvement, which corresponds to a 24% reduction of the total optical pump power compared to conventional MC-EDFA with only forward cladding pumping. Although the NF deteriorated by 1.0 dB in wavelength average in the 4.5-THz signal bandwidth in exchange for the efficiency improvement, degradation of the 34.2-GBaud polarization multiplexed 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (PM-16QAM) signal amplified by the BD-MC-EDFA operated under the optimized condition was negligible.