Gain Saturation of a 1.3 µm InGaAsP Traveling-Wave Amplifier in Picosecond Pulse Amplification

Abstract
Saturation energy of a 1.3 µm semiconductor laser traveling wave amplifier is found to depend both on the input pulsewidth and on the input pulse energy at picosecond regime. Shorter pulses are shown to have less saturation energy than longer pulses, which suggests the nonlinear gain give influence to the response of the amplifier. The simulated pulsewidth dependent energy gain by a set of traveling wave rate equations incorporating the nonlinear gain shows fairly good agreement with the measurements.