Modeling of noise in erbium-doped fiber amplifiers in the saturated regime

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Abstract
We have made a theoretical study of the noise figure of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers in the saturated regime. The noise figures of amplifiers subjected to specific gain and gain compression requirements were calculated for various amplifier lengths. The resulting noise figures together with the required pump and input signal powers map out all possible solutions given constraints on gain, compression, pump power, output signal power, and noise figure. In some cases, requirements on the output signal power prohibit any solutions. A way to solve this problem is the introduction of a post-amplifier loss. For this configuration, two possible solutions exist, which collapse into one solution at a certain critical loss, under which there exist no solutions. When the impact of amplified spontaneous emission is neglected in the model, only one solution is obtained, and the critical loss is much smaller than when the amplified spontaneous emission is included in the model. We conclude that amplified spontaneous emission generally has to be taken into account, even when the gain is as low as 10 dB, to accurately predict the noise performance of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers.