The development of compact eye-safe optical amplifiers has been recently triggered by the need of airborne LIght Detection And Ranging systems (LIDARs) for environmental monitoring and surveillance. Among potential candidate materials, phosphate glasses can incorporate high amounts of rare earth ions, thus allowing for high optical gain per unit length which would result in few-cm long optical amplifier sections. Another advantage guaranteed by a short length optical amplifier is the possibility to reduce the unwanted non-linear effects, e.g. Stimulated Brillouin Scattering, which cause distortion in the beam profile and affect the performance of the device.
We report on the design and fabrication of Yb/Er-doped phosphate glasses to be used as active materials for the core of a waveguide amplifier. The prepared glasses were characterized in their physical and optical properties and the best composition selected for the fabrication of the amplifier. Suitable cladding compositions were explored, and the final core/cladding glass pair was processed by melt-quenching the glasses into the desired shapes: core rods were obtained by casting the glass into preheated cylindrical glass molds, while the cladding glass tubes were fabricated by extrusion using an in-house developed equipment. The optical waveguide was then obtained using a custom induction heated optical fiber drawing tower. Preliminary results of optical amplification are presented for the single stage Master Oscillator Power Amplifier (MOPA), using a CW source as seed laser.
The reported activity was carried out in the framework of the NATO Science for Peace and Security project “Caliber”, grant no. SPS G5248.
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