Thermally tuned parametric gain in photonic crystal fiber-based amplifiers

Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) are good candidates for nonlinear optic applications owing to their versatile characteristics such as high nonlinearity and controllable dispersion. One of the important applications of PCFs is usage as a nonlinear medium for parametric amplification. In this paper, we investigate for the first time the effect of temperature on the parametric gain tuning in PCFs via heating the water infiltrated in cladding air holes. To this end, we consider two designs of PCFs (PCF 1 and PCF 2) and simulate their dispersion curves for different temperatures. Then, parametric gain spectra and saturation curves are simulated for each temperature via solving coupled amplitude equations. The results show that as the temperature is changed, the gain spectrum and the saturation power can be dramatically tuned over the telecommunication region. For example, as the temperature varies from 10 to 90, the gain peak wavelength obtained from the PCF1 and PCF2 is tuned over 1232.00-1264.00 nm and 1570.00-1592.00 nm, respectively. In addition, the saturation power of the PCF1 and PCF2 is, respectively, tuned over 4.00-7.65 dBm and 1.50-3.90 dBm. The results of this paper may be of great interest for applications in fiber optic communications such as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) systems.