Polymer optical fiber amplifiers for communication and sensor applications

Organic dyes and rare earth chelates have been chosen and incorporated into the core regions of graded index (GI) polymer optical fibers (POF) as gain media. Since the synthetic polymer shows much better compatibility with organic fluorescent materials and is amenable to high active dopant concentrations, the doped POFs produce high gains in short lengths of fiber. We demonstrated that organic dye-doped polymer optical fiber amplifiers (POFA) cover a wide spectral range in the visible with a best observed gain of 37 dB in a Rhodamine B-doped POFA pumped at 550 nm. Also, with a GI POF doped with europium chelate of hexafluoroacetylacetone in tris form, we observed superfluorescence, evidenced by spectral narrowing and lifetime shortening. The prospect is that the wide choice of organic dyes and rare earth chelates offers optical amplifiers and superfluorescenct sources for a variety of communication and sensor applications.