Recent Developments in Cladding-Pumped Doped Fiber Amplifiers for Telecommunications Systems

This paper aims to review recent developments in the field of doped fiber-based optical amplifiers and serve as a reference for promising optical signal amplification techniques that may be useful for practical implementation in high-capacity and cost-efficient telecommunications systems. The main focus is put on different rare-earth dopant elements, double-clad fibers, and optical couplers for cladding-pumping technique. It is found that codoped double-clad fiber-based amplifiers currently have attained the main research interest and show possible application also in multichannel fiber optical transmission systems. Additionally, we have compared different free space and waveguide construction optical coupling techniques suitable for doped double-clad fiber amplifiers.