Novel design of inherently gain-flattened discrete highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber Raman amplifier and dispersion compensation using a single pump in C-band.

In this paper, we report, for the first time, an inherently gain-flattened discrete highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (HNPCF) Raman amplifier (HNPCF-RA) design which shows 13.7 dB of net gain (with +/-0.85-dB gain ripple) over 28-nm bandwidth. The wavelength dependent leakage loss property of HNPCF is used to flatten the Raman gain of the amplifier module. The PCF structural design is based on W-shaped refractive index profile where the fiber parameters are well optimized by homely developed genetic algorithm optimization tool integrated with an efficient vectorial finite element method (V-FEM). The proposed fiber design has a high Raman gain efficiency of 4.88 W(-1) . km(-1) at a frequency shift of 13.1 THz, which is precisely evaluated through V-FEM. Additionally, the designed module, which shows ultra-wide single mode operation, has a slowly varying negative dispersion coefficient (-107.5 ps/nm/km at 1550 nm) over the operating range of wavelengths. Therefore, our proposed HNPCF-RA module acts as a composite amplifier with dispersion compensator functionality in a single component using a single pump.