There are several simulation tools that can be used to design optical amplifiers. Popular commercial tools have been developed by Optiwave Systems and VPI Systems.
The adoption of high power fiber lasers as an industrial material processing tool has been ongoing for several years and is now expanding into other markets including the medical and scientific markets. One key enhancement enabling penetration into the scientific market has been the improvements in high finesse fiber amplifiers, which are now capable of delivering single frequency linewidths (<5 kHz) together with excellent beam quality and stable linearly polarized output. Systems meeting these specifications have steadily progressed in the last few years from a few watts of output power, initially to the tens of watts and now into the hundreds of watts power level. This power scaling has been achieved with developments in the fiber technology, such as the adoption of stimulated brillouin scattering (SBS) suppression/mitigation techniques within the fiber, along with improvements in the overall amplifier design including large mode area (LMA) fibers with a low-aperture core, micro-...
Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are amplifiers which use a semiconductor to provide the gain medium. These amplifiers have a similar structure to Fabry–Pérot laser diodes but with anti-reflection design elements at the end faces. Recent designs include anti-reflective coatings and tilted wave guide and window regions which can reduce end face reflection to less than 0.001%. Since this creates a loss of power from the cavity which is greater than the gain, it prevents the amplifier from acting as a laser. Another type of SOA consists of two regions. One part has a structure of a Fabry-Pérot laser diode and the other has a tapered geometry in order to reduce the power density on the output facet. Semiconductor optical amplifiers are typically made from group III-V compound semiconductors such as GaAs/AlGaAs, InP/InGaAs, InP/InGaAsP and InP/InAlGaAs, though any direct band gap semiconductors such as II-VI could conceivably be used. Such amplifiers are often used in telecommunicati...
An optical parametric amplifier allows the amplification of a weak signal-impulse in a noncentrosymmetric nonlinear medium (e.g. Beta barium borate (BBO)). In contrast to the previously mentioned amplifiers, which are mostly used in telecommunication environments, this type finds its main application in expanding the frequency tunability of ultrafast solid-state lasers (e.g. Ti:sapphire). By using a noncollinear interaction geometry optical parametric amplifiers are capable of extremely broad amplification bandwidths.
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