Silicon photonics LMA amplifiers: High power, high gain, low noise and tunable polarization sensitivity

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Abstract
High-power amplifiers are of great importance in many optical systems deployed in optical sensing, ranging, medical surgery, material processing and more. Likewise, high-gain, low-noise amplifiers with low polarization dependence are critical components of long-range optical communication systems. Integrated photonic solutions show great potential in challenging application fields thanks to their drastic reduction in size, weight and cost, but this comes at the expense of low optical power due to reduced energy storage capacity in small devices. Recently, the large mode area (LMA) technology, which is well known for dramatically increasing the output power of fiber amplifiers by orders of magnitude, has been brought to the chip-level. With a large optical mode in the gain medium, the energy storage capacity and saturation power are increased significantly, allowing for high-power amplification with watt-level output power directly from the chip. In this work we demonstrate that a single integrated LMA amplifier is capable of both high-power amplification up to 800 mW with output saturation powers > 115 mW as well as high small-signal net gain up to 30 dB and low-noise amplification with noise figures < 4 dB. The LMA design further allows for a tuning of the polarization dependent gain (PDG) by adjusting the pump power and pump polarization, making it possible to completely nullify the polarization-sensitivity for any given signal power from the μW to mW-level. The power and noise performance achieved surpasses the performance level of many integrated amplifiers and fiber-based amplifiers. We believe that the tunability of the PDG combined with high gain and low noise figure can play a disruptive role for next-generation integrated amplifiers in telecommunication networks.
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