Ultrafast laser inscription of a high-gain Er-doped bismuthate glass waveguide amplifier

An Er-doped bismuthate glass waveguide amplifier has been fabricated using ultrafast laser inscription. Under zero pump conditions, the 87.0 mm long waveguide exhibited a fiber-to-fiber insertion loss of 4.0 dB at 1618 nm, outside the Er(3+) ion absorption band. We attribute approximately 1.8 dB of the insertion loss to coupling losses, 0.2 dB to Fresnel reflections and approximately 2.0 dB to propagation losses. When pumped using 1050 mW of 980 nm light, the amplifier exhibited a peak internal gain per unit length of 2.3 dB.cm(-1) at 1533 nm and a peak fiber-to-fiber net gain of 16.0 dB at 1533 nm. In this paper we also report the results of output power saturation and noise figure measurements.