Optimizing the incoherent pump spectrum of low-gain-ripple distributed fiber Raman amplifier for a given main pump...

The method for designing the incoherent pump spectrum for the distributed fiber Raman amplifiers (DFRAs) of low gain ripple is studied, in which the wavelength of the maximum power spectral density can be assigned. The assigned wavelength is called the main pump wavelength. Incoherent pump spectrum is described with the power spectral density function (PSDF) that comprises a set of piece-wise continuous functions. PSDF is optimized for the minimum gain ripple with the least-square minimization method. An extremum pump wavelength condition is applied to PSDF. A proper initial trial PSDF is given so that the optimized PSDF converges to the desired result and the power spectral density at the extremum pump wavelength is the maximum. With this design method, we show the optimized PSDFs for the DFRAs using backward pumping and bidirectional pumping. The gain ripples of considered DFRAs are less than 0.1 dB for 20-dB ON-OFF Raman gain over 70-nm bandwidth. The reduction of average effective noise figure with shorter main pump wavelength is shown and investigated.