Basic performance of an organic dye-doped polymer optical fiber amplifier.

A polymer optical fiber amplifier (POFA) of the graded-index (GI) type, with gain in the visible region, was successfully prepared for the first time, to our knowledge, with the interfacial-gel polymerization technique. An input signal of 0.85Wat 591 nm was amplified to 420W(27-dB gain) by injection of 690W of pump power at 532 nm into a GI POFA with a 0.5-m length. The efficiency of conversion of pump energy to signal amplification was more than 60%.