Photonic Integrated Circuit-Based Erbium-Doped Amplifier

(EPFL, June 17, 2022)

A team of researchers led by EPFL Professor Tobias Jan Kippenberg and PhD student Zheru Qiu recently developed a compact erbium-doped waveguide amplifier (EDWA), which can not only generate a record output power of more than 145 milliwatts, but also provide a small-signal net gain above 30 decibels, which translates to an over 1,000-fold amplification in the telecommunication band in continuous operation. This is an exciting development, because as explained by Kippenberg, operating with high output power and high gain is not a mere academic achievement, but rather, it is crucial to the practical operation of any amplifier, and also signals that high-pulse-energy femtosecond-lasers on a chip can finally become possible using this approach.