ABSTRACT
The Er3+-doped iber ampliier (EDFA) covering the C-band (1,5301,565 nm) has received great success in optical telecommunication systems in the past decades. With the rapidly growing demands on the transmission capacity for having additional amounts of information transmitted over the current, existing iber-optic networks, utilization of entire possible transmission windows ranging from 1,200 nm to 1,700 nm of the OH-free silica optical iber become ultimately necessary. In particular, the application of dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) is growing in popular use where broadband ampliiers and tunable lasers are vital devices. As in common applications of the EDFA the characteristics of the erbium spectra have limited the gain bandwidth of ampliiers spectra
at most within 100 nm, the creation of novel broadband optical iber ampliiers using new materials has attracted much attention. There has been extensively reported work on realization of the broadband near-infrared (NIR) emission by doping or codoping rare earth (RE) ions, bismuth ions, or transition metal ions in different materials. For this purpose, chalcogenide (ChG) or chalcohalide (ChH) glasses stand out as excellent hosts due to their low phonon energy, large refractive index, and fairly high solubility for activators. This chapter presents our recent work on broadband NIR photoluminescence (PL) of doped ChG/ChH glasses.
