Lasing and Gain Properties of Multicomponent Optical Fibers with Heavily Er-Doped Phosphate Core and Silica Cladding

Summary form only given. The most common Er-doped fibres being used today are silica-based. However solubility limit of erbium ions in silica glass restrict shortening of the gain medium in fibre light sources and that way, it limits improving single-frequency fibre lasers, amplifiers and pulsed fibre lasers characteristics. Shortening of a fibre gain medium might be successfully realised by using high-concentration Er-doped phosphate glasses. It was shown that such type of glass allows getting rare-earth ions concentration an order of magnitude higher in comparison with silica glasses without ions clusterization [1]. But significant drawbacks of phosphate fibres are their low corrosion resistance and high losses of its fusion splices with standard silica fibres [2]. The main purpose of our work was an investigation of fibre light sources based on novel multicomponent fibre with 3wt.% Er-doped phosphate core and silica cladding, which take advantages of both phosphate and silica glasses.