Applicability of silica core photonic crystal fiber for distributed Raman amplification transmission

In this paper, we describe Raman amplification characteristics and the potential for distributed Raman amplification (DRA) transmission in silica core photonic crystal fiber (PCF). We measured the Raman gain spectra of PCFs at different pump wavelengths, and confirmed that the pump wavelength dependence of the Raman gain coefficient of PCF agrees well with that of silica glass. DRA transmission performance in the 850 and 1580 nm wavelength regions was also examined individually using 6.0 and 12.7 km long PCFs. Finally, we clarified numerically that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be improved over a wide wavelength region by using silica core PCF and DRA. Our results show that silica core PCF has potential as a DRA transmission medium over an arbitrary wavelength region. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.