Investigation of structural dependence of host erbium-doped triangular-lattice PCF on lasing properties and design of high performance laser

Abstract

A detailed study is presented on the lasing properties of an erbium-doped photonic crystal fiber (PCF) laser. The effects of the host PCF's structure and laser parameters on continuous-wave laser emission are analyzed by considering the confinement and overlap of pump and signal fields in the gain medium for varying values of pitch, hole diameter, and doping radius. For analysis, we used a finite-difference mode-calculation algorithm devised with standard population and propagation rate-equation solver. Our analysis, applied to an experimentally realized PCF laser, reproduces the observed/ reported data, thereby showing the efficacy of our analysis. Finally, a fiber geometry to realize a laser with threshold as low as 6 mW using a short fiber length of 0.52 m is prescribed. The aim of the design is to greatly reduce splice loss with standard single-mode SM28/G.652 fiber while maintaining the optimum performance. These results are new in PCF laser research and should be useful in realizing high performance PCF-based laser devices.