<title>Bandwidth-expandable erbium-doped fiber optical amplifiers</title>

Abstract

A narrowband optical amplifier but bandwidth-expandable is demonstrated. Future amplifier-based sub-system can be constructed to perform non-linear dispersion compensation and to flatten gain while the input level changes in a DWDM optical networking system. The amplifier is designed to inherently provide two networking features: narrowband accessibility and bandwidth scalability. For a 100 GHz- spaced DWDM application, each amplifier can process 4 channels in an array structure. The crosstalk between each amplifier is better than 58 dB. The capability to flatten gain and improve the transient response is experimentally demonstrated.