Two-Layer Erbium-Doped Air-Core Circular Photonic Crystal Fiber Amplifier for Orbital Angular Momentum Mode Division Multiplexing System

Abstract

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) mode-division multiplexing (MDM) has recently been under intense investigations as a new way to increase the capacity of fiber communication. In this paper, a two-layer Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) for an OAM multiplexing system is proposed. The amplifier is based on the circular photonic crystal fiber (C-PCF), which can maintain a stable transmission for 14 OAM modes by a large index difference between the fiber core and the cladding. Further, the two-layer doped region can balance the amplification performance of different modes. The relationship between the performance and the parameters of the amplifier is analyzed numerically to optimize the amplifier design. The optimized amplifier can amplify 18 modes (14 OAM modes) simultaneously over the C-band with a differential mode gain (DMG) lower than 0.1 dB while keeping the modal gain over 23 dB and noise figure below 4 dB. Finally, the fabrication tolerance and feasibility are discussed. The result shows a relatively large fabrication tolerance in the OAM EDFA parameters.