Performance degradation and recovery of irradiated spaceborne fiber amplifier

Abstract

The output performance of the spaceborne fiber amplifier will degrade when exposed to radiation in aerospace environment. In this work, we have proposed a two-stage erbium-ytterbium-co-doped fiber amplifier (EYDFA) and studied the degradation performance under irradiation and recovery through the annealing process without employing any additional device. An irradiation experiment is conducted to test the performances of the amplifier under the irradiation environment, and experimental results indicate that the output power as well as optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) exhibit similar irradiation responses. The amplifier was annealed through photobleaching and natural annealing processes. The output performance almost recovers to its initial level, and it is verified that the annealing efficiency for high intensity photobleaching is about 240 times as much as that for the case of natural annealing. This work confirms that the spaceborne fiber amplifier could achieve performance recovery after being irradiated, which is beneficial to the enhancement of the radiation hardness for future spaceborne fiber optical devices.