Star couplers with gain using fiber amplifiers

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Abstract
The authors propose a novel technique for constructing large passive star couplers with gain using high-power erbium-doped fiber (EDF) amplifiers. In contrast to other proposed techniques where each output port of the coupler requires its own EDF amplifier, the proposed alternative requires few EDF amplifiers with sufficient output saturation power levels. When used in an FDM/WDM star network, the size of the coupler can be increased by a factor of m using m narrowband EDF amplifiers. Moreover, this alternative avoids coupling the pump-laser light through the star coupler itself, alleviating the requirement on designing large bandwidth couplers to accommodate the signal and the pump wavelengths.